The ghosts of my passenger seat

I jumped in the truck today after a drop/receive at the library and immediately swiveled around to ask Laura a question about some book or song I was thinking about. But she wasn't there; I took her to the airport on Tuesday morning. I wanted to turn around and double-check to make sure my darling cousin wasn't making a nest amongst the jumpseats in back, but I knew that it was fruitless. I grew so used to having driving companions on my extended weekend/very short sabbatical that I have been having trouble adjusting. No one to talk, ruminate, muse, or ponder with (dialoguing is still out).

This is not a new phenomenom. Many times post-Deven I could swear that if I squinted hard enough that she would appear out of a haze, seated right there beside me exactly in appearance (same clothes, same familiar ponytail, same bright pink toenail polish) as she was before stepping out of the truck on a bright, sunny summer day -- right before she took another step right out of my life shortly thereafter. And this is long after I'd gotten over her and hadn't thought about her in months; it was if some phantom essence of her infused itself into the plush and vinyl after only a half a dozen rides.

And long before that the two great loves of my late teenage years -- my ex-girlfriend and Blue, my old '89 VW Jetta -- had combined to form an ever-looping emo song running on four wheels and $1.19 a gallon. That vehicle saw hours and hours of me and Annie together -- good times, first dates, trips to the mountains and every point between Roswell and Marietta, back-seat escapades, and later fights, midnight tears, and near-death experiences while attempting empty shots at reconciliation. That car became mother-fucking Christine; that car was alive. So much love and memory and emotion was poured into that car until the chassis and everything built on it was inundated with it. Dash, seats, stick shift, radio knob; everything on that car had a Annie-memory attached. Long after she was gone I would swear to feeling her presence or recognizing her scent as I drove down those old north Georgia roads we had taken so many times together.

I fucking killed that car. Something deep within my brain must have realized that I was torturing myself just driving that thing to the corner store. That car was going on 300K miles and was still fine other than a handful of minor annoyances and the eventual lack of a reverse. Something subconciously must have told me to exorcise that poltergeist and try to move on. I fucked up a coolant hose on my way home from work one day and I burned that fucking engine up. I loved you to death Blue, but to death you had to go.

But now it's just me and Grace until someone else comes along. The only thing I'm reaching over the center console to grab is maybe some library books or my groceries. Until then I'll keep screaming at Massholes and talking to myself and my truck over the sounds of NPR.