I knew this little woman whose car was a violent rambling damp machine. All the vinyl seats were split and the yellow foam stuck to your clothes. Occasionally the road would call to her and she would point her creaking heap toward the longest black ribbon on the map.

Her name was Melancholy.

Around the time of year when girls appear on the beach in bikinis, I needed to get to a nearby city. I had been invited to give a poetry reading at a festival. I called on Melancholy, hoping that her foot was aching for an accelerator.

When she was happy her paintings were blue. While in those moods one could rarely find her.

I found her in the sun, dangling her legs from a balcony. I stood there awhile before she spoke, not looking at me;

“The man on the television said they had found people clinging together in the ruins,’ and then, picking at a scab on her knee, “is that poignant or fucking what?”

After a minute I offered, “I need to get to the City…they invited me”.

Jumping awkwardly down onto the lawn she laughed, “well then you can enter, like a vampire” and swooshed an imaginary cape.

It was night, somewhere on the highway, in the soft orange of headlights flickering on road signs, before suddenly she spoke again.

“Did you know, in the 1960’s a guy invented a tablet, made from a derivative of calcium and enamel polymer, that if you chewed once as a child would practically ensure that as an adult you would not suffer from cavities”.

I said that I didn’t, had never heard.

“yup!” she mumbled, “motherfucking toothpaste company bought the patent”.

“Cunts” I said, lighting a cigarette.

It was about then we came across the wreck.

Months earlier, I was hitching along the esplanade in a storm when Melancholy and I crossed paths. The first thing she said to me, through the steamed up window of her serial killers car, was that if I pretended to be her boyfriend, and joined her for dinner with her parents, that I could have a lift. As I got in she stated, for the record, that she might be in love with a woman, “so don’t get too excited”.

There was a packet of Prozac on the dashboard and a photograph of a German Shepherd, a little statue of Buddha hanging from the mirror.
She was shivering and listening to Pink Floyd and it screeched mono through a tinny speaker. I noticed her hair was soaking wet and mentioned it, making conversation. She claimed to have never owned an umbrella and that she refused to duck her head in the rain, everyone does that “except mystics and Agent 99”.

The weeks that followed were haunted stories; reaching out to touch her reflection and finding it clammy, a summer of unending menstrual thunder, a year she spent somewhere safe with polished metal mirrors. The death of her Mother, the boyfriend who cheated while overseas, that she was afraid of Christians, and maybe she had been abandoned by God.

“Just forgot me, like a baby in a casino”, she was sobbing.

She was my first real female friend and we would lock arms with the affinity of engineers; she tried to make me dance, but I don’t dance.

She read my poems and claimed to have seen assassins lurking in the text, was worried that I was hungry, introduced me to her brother.

She was saying that to appreciate Beauty you have to find it in the ugly, like a puppy running into traffic, ash from an abattoir sifted on the trees, a flower under a tractor wheel or an abandoned pram among other junk by the tracks.

And then the wreck.

Abruptly on the road before us appeared a group of tourists bleeding in the dark, their mini-bus in flames, the remains of a horse spread across the asphalt. We slowed as we approached and a burned girl flung herself across the hood. Her bra had melted into her breasts. She was trying to scream but it seemed her mouth was fused shut. There were piles of luggage and bodies soaked in diesel and animal guts. A man with mangled hands shrieking on the median strip. Another guy vomiting blood and teeth crouched over a crumpled looking old woman wearing a bright red shawl with white dots.

Melancholy wound up her window and sunk deeper into her seat.

“We have to help these people”, I almost yelled, overcome.

“The soul is the ancestral animals, the body their knowledge” she quoted some obscure magician or something.

“What the fuck are you saying?” I shouted proper this time, “there are people dying on the highway, we have to help them!”

“That poor horse, death by stupid tourist” she kind of intoned to herself.

I saw then in her eyes the institution, a hundred doctors prodding her unconscious mind, a crying child by her mother’s grave. Her Brother decapitating dolls.

Once when we were walking home drunk, at midnight it was sweltering, she stripped naked and ran into the ocean. I gathered up her clothes and waited, pacing the sand until the sun ached over the horizon. I called the police and an ambulance and fell into despair. I watched the search until late afternoon and hobbled home with my heart broken.

Two days later she showed up at my room like nothing had happened.

She said she was a big girl and didn’t need anyone’s permission to disappear.

Sometimes my fear for her floats like a bruise in a bowl of milk.