When I was in my early twenties, I went to a rather boring party and noticed a girl who was incongruous with the rest of the crowd — long leather coat despite the humid heat of Amsterdam in the summer, a row of earrings all the way up her helix, and drinking like there was no tomorrow. I knew the guy who threw the party, and I couldn't imagine this girl was in his circle of friends. Well, neither was I, because I had arrived with one of his friends. Still his friends didn't look like punk rockers either.
I went up to her and asked her who she knew at the party. She smiled impishly and spoke in English with an American accent, "You're the only one."
Severine had crashed the party, which she did habitually in the States. I liked her boldness and we got to talking, then we left the party and wandered through the Vondelpark. We were smoking and an annoying guy came up to her and told her to give him a cigarette. She asked me for a translation, then took the guy's outstretched hand and extinguished her cigarette in the palm of his hand.
He got mad and pulled a knife. I whistled to get his attention and pulled my balisong knife. While he was distracted by my knife twirling, Severine punched him hard in the eye and he went down on his ass. Then she kicked him in the face and he went down all the way. I put my knife away and grinned — this chick was weird and violent, but I knew she wouldn't be boring.
Severine took me to a place she was staying, where she pulled at my clothes and threw me on the bed (I'm no lightweight). As my head hit the pillow, I bruised the back of my head on something hard under the pillow. I reached for it and pulled a Dirty Harry type of revolver from underneath. She grinned and told me the gun was for 'home defence'. I told her it was a good thing she didn't walk around with it. She smiled and opened her long leather coat. She only wore a long torn Ramones T-shirt and her tattoos and my eyes were focused on her body until I noticed there was a holstered gun attached to the lining of her coat.
We were together for about a month, in which I learned that she was absolutely fearless, that she had once thrown a lover from a balcony for hitting her, that she loved to sculpt stuff by welding metal together, and that she lived in a commune in New York.
When she left, Severine invited me to come with her and stay in the commune, but I was too attached to Amsterdam to give up my life and move to the States. I took her to Schiphol and she tried to convince me to come with her. I asked her to stay, but she couldn't. And I couldn't go with her.
So she left and I never saw her again. I felt like I had missed a chance I should've taken, but I didn't take any action to remedy the situation.
Two years later I got a call from her mother — she had found my name in her daughter's papers and tracked me down to give me the news that Severine had died, falling from a rooftop. The authorities weren't sure why she was up there and why she fell and whether it was suicide or something more ignominious.
I always wondered what would've happened if I had gone with her to the States and if she would've died if I'd been there. The only thing I could do was take her essence and put her in my fiction.
R.I.P. Severine.