There was a time when she stood in the
world and read about people who had gone before her. She stood there and just
breathed and
listened to the
earth move around her, encircling the
sun, and she stood on it and felt it move. When
wind blew, she was it, blowing away towards the
clouds. Fleecy, floating, a white fluffy thing in the sky, the sky turning
apocalyptic, the sky turning out to look like computer-generated
bubble wrap one day, scaring her strangely inside while she joked around about a false
fear she professed to. Then at
night, she grew, grew up and away from the bonds of her
youth, into a
mare, running wild in the
winter. Seasons changed, and still she grew, every day new thoughts crowding into the manifold of her
mind, and one night she found herself driving down a dark
highway, surrounded by the headlights of cars, at the bottom of her
despair.
Sex was almost dirty, almost a sacred ritual, her only love a tale of sacred sordid nights in the basement, the silent pulling up of clothing, nails scratched down backs, teeth ground into lips. She didn’t like to masturbate, mainly because her fingers were always so cold that when she placed them between her legs all the warmth was sucked from her. But that night, driving through a silent winter landscape with the music glaring and soft, she understood. She accidentally brushed her hand against her body, and it was a tearing, a rift, and she wanted to drive fast around corners. She drove a truck, old white four-speed and no one knew why, she was certainly rich enough to have better, but she was attached to it like a dog to a master, like a master to a dog. She’d never had a dog. Now, in the night, she drove, and her hand slowly slid between the buttons of her pants, loose on top of skin, and she felt the coldness like a shock. She leaned over and shoved the heater up again, feeling the warmth fill the cab, until it stopped being a warmth to keep out the winter and became a sexual heat. She turned off the freeway and sat at the light, fingers underneath the coat, underneath the pants, feeling the stubble of her shaved quim, sliding under more and feeling silky smoothness. Onto a road that curved in the night, driving faster and faster, around curves and corners, fingers moving with the night, the wheel, the curves. The cars in front jammed on their brakes on the turn and she shot out into the opposing lane, free of headlights in the cold winter night, pulling ahead, doing 65 on a sharp corner, then coming, warm and sticky, the smell pervading the car, reminding her of better times, when she wasn’t alone, in a car, on dangerous corners.