Tonight's writing

It doesn’t need to be love. It doesn’t have to be romance. I just want someone I can talk to.

“I want you just the way youuuu are …” the girl who is not me croons. She’s sitting in my passenger seat wearing huge Jackie O sunglasses.

“You’re off key,” I say. It’s late spring. Lavender blooms everywhere, its scent huckstering its way into nostrils, causing allergic reactions. Birds of Paradise emerge from their winter cocoons, poking colorful heads out into a world made suddenly warmer, more inviting.

“Spring fever,” she says. “Dance fever. Jungle boogie.”

I ignore her. She makes no goddamned sense.

We’re crossing the Richmond-San Rafael bridge. It connects a poverty-stricken, crime-ridden city with one of the richest jewels in the nation.

“You know Jerry Garcia?” the girl says.

“Yeah,” I say. “The name sounds familiar.”

“He first thought up ‘Terrapin Station’ while he was crossing this bridge.”

“How proud you must be,” I say, “to be such a fount of knowledge.”

When it comes to her, the sarcasm’s grown to be second nature. It just comes up, nearly independent of my free will. If it bothers her, she doesn’t show it. “Hold away despair,” she says. “More than this I will not ask.”

The bridge is a roller coaster and blue surrounds us on both sides. We are leaving darkness, an industrial area with tattered collars and more than its share of weaponry, and traveling into another dimension: Marin County.

“If you insist,” I say.

“I don’t. It’s Jerry. It’s his song.”

“Since when were you such a Deadhead?”

She keeps changing her tune on me, this one. Sometimes I’d rather be saddled with Hitler than listen to this bitch prattle. But she’s part of me, so I don’t really get much choice in the matter.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and I don’t feel I’m at all part of what I see. My fair-weather eyes – sometimes brown, occasionally green – and my rounded wedge of a nose, my toothy smile and all that surrounds it, all this appears plastic, as though it’s been grafted from its rightful owner.

There is a girl who treads the pathways of her world, crossing from the grimy to the golden. She is all head and no body. She is dual. She is bifurcated. She has divided into a series of mirrored branches. One to sense the pain. Another to deflect it.