The Ride

I was walking across campus the next day when a silver sports car roared suddenly from behind, then stormed past, missing me by inches. It screeched to a halt and then backed up beside me. The tinted passenger window opened and I bent down a bit to look inside.

"Hey, do you have a few minutes?"

I looked inside. Jim leaned over and hollered.

"Come on. Let's take a ride."

The door clicked and opened a bit. I really had nowhere to be particularly, so I decided it couldn't hurt. I climbed in, fell into the very low seat, and shut the door when a rush of Gs pinned me to the seat back.

"What do you think?"
"Fast car," I choked.
"Ya. Got it yesterday."
"Very nice."

I knew nothing about cars, but could tell this was was something special. There were seemingly thousands of colorful lights sprinkled throughout the dashboard, a navigation system, and so forth. And, it was doing things on the road that I thought impossible in any land vehicle.

"So, Vanessa told me about your visit last night."
"She did?"
"Like I said, Vanessa tells me everything."

I was a bit disturbed, although I shouldn't have been. After all, there was nothing at all private about her blog. It was open for everyone to see, as was mine. All of her wild fantasies and exaggerations were free in blazing lights for all the world to see. Jim knew all about her writing, and my poetry. Apparently, he still assumed at least some of it was real. Of course, this particular incident actually was real in some technical sense, perhaps more than most the others.

"So, you've got to tell me. Why did you do it? Why did you walk away?"
"Jim. You know that Vanessa. Well, you know that she has an active imagination."
"Ha. No question there. You don't look much like a god to me."
"Right, obviously. Not much of anything she writes is actually factual, you know?"
"I know. She told me about it. It's just that, well, Vanessa seemed hurt, or confused...I don't know. I think she expected an explanation."

After I read her entry I simply couldn't think of the right words. It had been two days, and I usually responded in some way. I would at least write a seemingly irrelevant line of prose or a short poem, usually more. This, however, simply seemed too real to write about. It was as if my imagination was checked somehow by actually confronting her.

"Well, man, just thought I'd let you know. She really likes you, ya know."
"I know, thanks Jim."

Jim dropped me off at the dorm and thundered away.