First Anarchy, Then Lidl
Jasmin was a committed punk—shaved comprehensively, dressed accordingly, philosophically opposed to the entire existing order and willing to tell you about it at length whether you’d asked or not. She listened to Slipknot with the fervor of someone who had found something true in the noise, and she would have cheerfully watched society burn. She also claimed, constantly, to come from a Roma family, which she treated as a trump card in every argument regardless of whether the argument had anything to do with it.
I met her at the nursing home near my place, where I was suffering through a spectacularly boring and underpaid job at the front desk, and she was working off community service hours by subjecting the residents to board games and mental arithmetic. On the bridge outside she ignored me completely. Two floors up, in the elevator, something shifted—and we spent the next few hours throwing our clothes at each other in the chapel on the top floor, then smoking a joint in the common room while most of the residents slept through lunch.
Most of them. Herr Brechtl was in his wheelchair by the window, watching us get dressed with a sharpness that suggested he’d never been asleep at all, calling out something about penises and towels. He wheeled us back into his room before we could escape, sat us down with tea, and explained at length why he’d specifically requested a view of the school athletics track across the street. He showed us albums from decades of nudist holidays—photograph after photograph of free, unencumbered human bodies in outdoor settings—and addressed us both with terms for genitalia from a different era, without any malice in it whatsoever. We laughed. We waited. When he nodded off, we ran.
In the bathroom afterward we crossed some further threshold—the kind that doesn’t have language until later—and lying on the cold tiles under the fluorescent light we swore, with complete sincerity, that we would never participate in capitalism, socialism, or any ism of any kind. Jasmin had convinced me. I wanted to renounce everything on the spot. We celebrated by walking to Lidl and stealing a couple of plastic-wrapped hot dogs, which felt like exactly the right act of revolution.
I held that conviction for almost two weeks. Then, at a school party, I cheated on her with Sabrina—blonde, Cheshire-cat grin, white socks, breasts of notably unequal size—and the anarchist project quietly dissolved. The next day Jasmin and I went for ice cream anyway, because what else do you do once something is already broken.
She was not calm about it afterward. The legend has it that she was so furious about Sabrina that she slammed her best friend’s head against his bathroom sink hard enough to shatter it completely—the sink, at minimum, possibly something in him too. I never saw Jasmin again after that. But I remain completely certain she is somewhere below us right now, engineering a revenge elaborate enough to drag every involved party straight to hell, where we will spend eternity listening to Herr Brechtl’s nudist photo albums described aloud. That strikes me as entirely proportionate.