Nothing Warm

“Honey, you seem depressed tonight.”

I turned and gazed through him in a daze. I wasn’t sure which color was more prevalent in the restaurant – gold of the rich snobby bastards that surrounded me, or red. Blood. Jamie’s blood. Or maybe love. It was Valentine’s Day. 

“Don’t be sad, honey. Think about your birthday coming up. 18! I’m gonna make you so happy!”

“Awww…”

He probably just wanted to get laid. He didn’t. Not by me, at least. And I stayed with him for almost a year.

He gave me a sports car. My dream car – a Firebird. In my favorite color, blue.

I tried to love him. He was a car. He was a nice place to live when my mother finally got the chance to kick out her non-adult psychotic child.

He kept me out of the mental hospital because he caused me to avoid it – just so he could maintain ignorance. I stayed on the meds until the last month, out of fear of the mental hospital, round four. It was too cold in there, and I was sick of the view of frozen rocks and tree limbs. I ended the meds because of an insatiable urge to deck him. Then I left him. I was free for once. I took the car with me. On a wild ride, I barreled towards my desired final freedom. 

*******

Screw the meds. I’m off those meds now, I can feel whatever I want, do whatever I want, fuck it all, fuck this whole thing anyway. The bridge seemed isolated, though I knew it wasn’t on either end. I was vaguely reminded of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but sans snow; substitute the snow with native Jersey smog. Only there were no Bible heroes talking in shining light from the stars – no Joseph up there, only Jamie, and unlike me, Jamie was the one we needed and could not do without. I should have never have been born; I did not prevent evil; I caused it. Jamie’s blood, frozen in wisps of cloud overhead. 

Take this fucking car with me. Might as well blast music for the last time. No CDs around. Whatever.

80. 90. 100. Almost ready to swerve. And…YO!

I swerved the other way. A woman was standing in my way.

About halfway down the bridge, I could finally stop the car. Thank God for good brakes.

This was ridiculous and highly unlikely. Regardless, I approached the woman. 

She was dressed in a lovely flowing dress that reminded me of river nymphs – “water sprite,” I thought. With long dark hair to match. It was obviously a sundress, but I could conjure images of but water, not fire. 

“What are you doing? Are you fucking drunk?”

“I could ask you the same question. You were driving like a drunk driver. All the way here. My friend gave me a lift here when we saw you zooming like crazy for the bridge. I told him to drop me off here. I like to help people.”

She spoke softly. I was starting to like her.

“Way to be the deus ex machina.”

She smiled and bowed her head, shaggy hair parting and softly bashing into the smooth sheen of her face. I thought of spring rains carving little nests into road ice at night, cars skidding and clawing viciously, finding refuge in these nests before possible salvation by the Angel of Death.

“I’m normal. I mean… wait… Define normal! Actually, I am probably significantly more depraved than you,” she said with head still bowed.

I grinned with an ease with which I was no longer accustomed. 

“Define depravity. Immaturity? For all the fact that adults are the only ones who can drive off of bridges, in retrospect it’s damned immature.”

“Touché. I no longer succumb to the lure of today’s pseudo-maturity. I’ll stick with true maturity, even if it’s no longer revered. Get in your car.”

We hiked down the bridge, luckily encountering nobody else. Truly a ghost bridge, it was. We leapt into the Firebird, my newly discovered water-sprite girl in the driver’s seat. 

“You have a license?”

“Yup. And that qualification called ‘lack of depression’.”

The clear night and empty highway were our sky, and so we flew.

“When you called yourself ‘depraved’, to what were you referring? I mean, I’ve tried to kill myself, drank like crazy, made at least three trips to the mental hospital, then used a guy for about a year just for his money and support, and all of this after I betrayed a girl I loved who cut her throat in from of me because I was wrong when I assumed she loved her boyfriend and not me.” My right hand gripping the bar above the car door, I glanced at her briefly, waiting for her to pull off the road and bolt.

She seemed barely fazed. “Oh. Never mind. I was just going to announce that I was a lesbian. OK. I’m not depraved.” She grinned.

“So you’re saying I am?” I laughed.

“Nah. Depravity is subjective, I guess. And I guessed you would blanch at my cliché confession. Guess not.”

She pulled off of an exit when a deviant blonde soccer mom in an SUV, probably out on a late-night brandy hunt, cut us off.

My upper body flew over hers instinctively in protection as she swerved; my hands landed on the wheel and righted the car. She took over as I landed on her lap in exhaustion.

I woke up about a half hour later, parked outside an apartment building. My head was in her lap still, but my hands seemed to have found a home near the back of her water-sprite dress. Sitting up groggily and considerably redder, I wondered how long I had been holding this strange girl. 

“Do you always get affectionate with people you just met?”

I grinned. “Cut me slack, yo. I was exhausted.”

“’Cut me slack, yo’? You Northern girls.”

“Yeah, if you call this no-snow freezer ‘the North’. I noticed you had an accent, though. I figured everyone in Heaven was educated in the South for a while.”

“You’re a New Yorker, aren’t you? The yokels getting too much for you? And here we are in PA, right in the middle of your Big Apple and good old Virginia. And at least it does snow here. Virginia only knows from ice.”

“It’s not exactly the middle. Closer to NYC.”

She sighed dramatically. “Well, at least you’re awake now. As they say where I come from, ‘Are you red-eye and left-legged, Skippy?’”

“As they say where I come from, ‘Fuck off and leave me alone’.”

“Peace! Hey…” Her already melodious voice softened further. “Who are you really? My name is Sasha.”

Sasha. I could see an angel Sasha.

“I’m Alex. Back when everything started, I was 17.”

The banter was over. The water-sprite had opened my true floodgates.