Jasmin
Jasmin was lightning. Shaved head and everywhere else, dressed like fury, the kind of punk who actually meant it—didn’t just listen to Slipknot and In Extremo and Knorkator but genuinely wanted to see the whole world burn in anarchist fire. She had a story about being raised by Romani, never got tired of telling it to anyone.
I was killing time at the reception desk of this nursing home—soul-crushing pay, pointless job—when she showed up doing community service. She’d blow past me on the bridge before the storage shed like I didn’t exist. But hours later in the elevator we were all over each other. The chapel on the top floor had decent light and nobody going up there. We were pulling off clothes, throwing them around, her pressed against the cold wall while the old people were downstairs sleeping. Then back together, back downstairs, lighting a joint in the common room like we hadn’t just broken three different rules.
Except the old man in the wheelchair. Herr Brechtl. He was staring at us with this look in his eyes when we were trying to get presentable again, started muttering something about penises and towels like he was talking in his sleep. Then he grabbed us and pulled us into his room. Tea. He made tea and explained why he’d specifically asked for a window facing the school’s sports field—the young girls in their PE uniforms, he said, matter-of-fact, like this was just conversation. He had albums. Decades of vacations where nobody wore anything. He’d named things. He had words from another era that somehow didn’t land mean, just old, just sad and horny in a way that made you laugh. We did laugh. We sang. And when he dozed off mid-sentence we got out of there.
The bathroom tiles are where it changed. Her talking about systems, about collapse, about everything being a lie we’d swallowed. And me suddenly willing to believe her, to burn it with her, to walk away from religion and reason and the whole compromised world. We had hands on each other swearing on nothing at all that we’d never touch this capitalist fundamentalist false-choice nightmare again. It felt like conversion. It felt like the first true thing either of us had ever felt.
Then we went to Lidl and stole some hot dogs because we were hungry.
Two weeks later there’s a party. A girl named Sabrina. Blonde, this actual smile on her face, one breast bigger than the other, white socks. I kissed her. I went home with her. The next day Jasmin and I got ice cream like none of it had happened, like we’d never sworn anything at all.
There’s a story about what she did after that. Her best friend’s bathroom sink. She supposedly smashed his head into it so hard over what I’d done that it just broke apart. I never saw her again. But I’m absolutely certain she’s somewhere deep, still plotting, building toward something that’s going to drag every one of us straight down to her, where we’ll spend eternity together listening to Herr Brechtl tell his nude vacation stories.
Maybe that’s fair. Maybe we earned it.