So this is it?

This is where I leave the car that incubated my autonomy in the world? The one that watched me go from sixteen and sweaty-palmed to twenty-one and waving goodbye as I trade this world for another?

California for New York, adolescence for adulthood?

Yes.

This is my love letter to the years that spanned that great between.

ARE WE THERE YET?

As a California kid, driving enveloped the great majority of my memories.

San Diego is infamous for being just a short drive from any world you would ever want to go to. The mountains, the ocean, the city, the desert, Los Angeles one way and Mexico the other. So you drive. You pile into the car with your pillow and your coloring book and ask your parents if you’re at Disneyland yet, the beach yet, somewhere exciting and exotic yet. You watch the world from the car window, following the moon as it follows you, memorizing the unbroken horizon of the coast as your minivan careens up it. We drove everywhere, and so, driving became the epitome of freedom to me from a young age, long before my parents nervously watched me get behind the wheel for the first time.

When I did get behind that wheel, a relationship began that I can’t believe I am seeing the end of now. It was one of those moments to which you hold up to the light and see a clear demarcation in time. There was before I could drive, and there was after. Getting my license was the first big thing I ever really did, the first accomplishment that made me realize that most things are scarier in theory than in practice. That all you all to do is learn.

I still remember the look of sheer terror on my driving instructor’s face as I attempted a three-point turn for the first time. I remember the bone-white of my mother’s knuckles as she held on for dear life and the calm, patient energy of my father as he watched his youngest child take her life in her own hands for the first time.

And then, I remember the first time that no one was in that passenger seat at all. I remember how unbelievable, how completely ludicrous and out of theirs minds everyone in the world seemed to give me license over a moving vehicle at sixteen. It was, in short, a feeling of infinity.

LEARNING TO DRIVE

I can honestly say that that initial exhilaration of sudden liberation, of being able to go anywhere I wanted whenever I wanted, never did wear off.

There was never anything more fun than driving around California with all the windows down and music blaring. There was certain music for certain times. Driving to high school in the early hours of the morning was Bon Iver, Lana Del Rey, The Fray. Driving by the beach during lunch hour against all school rules was David Bowie, The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, or any other variation of classic divinity that my friend’s green vintage Mercedes could pump out of an old CD. Ocean air mingled with the old stereo as I stuck my hand out of the window and waved to the corroding coast that just might as well have been my adolescence. Each was disintegrating at a rate that no one could account for.

Jazz was for sunset cruising and The Killers for fast, middle of the night drives homes from parties and bon fires, buzzed off the city lights that blurred all around me, tasting the stolen sensation of 1 am for the first time.

AN EXTENSION OF SELF

Over the next six years, that car would become as much a part of me as my childhood bedroom.

Slowly, it morphed into a haunted museum of my adolescence, one I haven’t dared disturb in years. When the pandemic happened, everything was frozen in time. If I had had a last day of school or a last track meet, if I had known that any of the last times were, in fact, the last times, maybe I would have cleaned out the hidden corners of that car. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt like I still needed it all for some reason, as if anything was ever coming back.

For a long time, the thought of going through it sounded as pleasant as the thought of fishing through an open wound with barbed wire. I avoided it at all costs, eventually forgetting it was there. Forgetting that I was, in fact, taking pieces of the past with me everywhere I went.

Until the other day. Until I was standing on my childhood street opening up the secret compartments of my trunk, only to find my whole life staring back up at me.

A CAR IS A TIME CAPSULE

The big red bow that my parents put on my car when they passed it down to me on my sixteenth birthday was still just right there. The dark blue sandy towel I kept for emergency trips to the beach. A tube of sunscreen. A baseball cap from some ski resort my parents went to a lifetime ago. And, then, right in the middle of it all like a splinter in my thumb—my old track bag.

I opened it up slowly, cautiously, not ready for what I would find. Two boxes of bandages, my shoes, and a folded up track meet roster that my coach had given me on that last day, when Covid was just a rumor and we thought we had a whole season to prepare for. I stared at that sheet for a minute longer than I needed to, watching the names and class levels swirl like alphabet soup on the page. Soup that I haven’t been able to stomach in years. I picked up a shoe and ran my hands over the lethal spikes on the bottom of it, remembering at once what all the band-aids were for. For a second I could still feel it, the way those spikes sliced my ankle open that one day or how my shins would ache after long meets. I could still see my coach rolling his eyes and telling me to push through it.

I found the padded box that I used to protect the egg my psychology teacher made us carry around like a baby for a week my senior year. Tampons in the glove department, Norah Jones CDs stolen from my parents, and a center console chalk full of scraps of paper that I pulled over to scrawl random thoughts onto whenever inspiration struck. An entire stack of two hour parking permits from all of my downtown rendezvous and one lingering blue slip of paper that acted as a pass to get out of school early. I used to call myself out and run off to the beach or the art museum every chance I got. Those blue papers still spike a rush of adrenaline when I look at them now. They meant escape.

FALLING MEMORIES

Open the sunglass compartment on the ceiling and watch six years worth of mementos fall into your lap.

Stickers, funky glasses, receipts, glitter, sticky notes, mismatched earrings, scrunchies. And, somehow, the little dried yellow flower that has lived there for six years, hanging right over my head as I drove through my life, reminding me of innocence just before it fell out of reach.

It was from a night I remember like you remember a dream. I was sixteen, sixteen because it was the one year of high school where everything was like a movie. I still immature enough to fit in, granting me access to the world of the American teenager that never was what I chalked it up to be, but came pretty close at times. This was one of those times.

My friends and I had gone to a small party at some house on the beach where a high school band played and a birthday girl ran around with a boyfriend on one arm and a bottle of beer in the other. The smell of pot was as pungent as the sense of wonder that filled every dilated eye you looked into.

After the party my friend and I drove along the cliffs, staring out into the blackened abyss that is the ocean devoid of it’s lover, the sun. We pulled into the abandoned playground we adored because it made us feel purely, distinctly, adolescent. There were yellow wildflowers growing up from the earth all over the place and she reached out and plucked one, placing it in my palm like a secret we both knew we could not keep forever. I tucked it into the sunglass department of my car where it shriveled up and died just as that friendship slowly would. But we didn’t know that, not yet. We didn’t know anything yet. Only the feeling of being sixteen and reckless, driving through those beach streets like we were going to live forever.

THE END OF SOMETHING

Those girls did not, in fact, live forever.

It could even be argued that they died that night, on that coastal rode with flowers pressed to their palms, for it was the last one that I remember before everything changed.

I grew up somewhere between sixteen and seventeen, not realizing that I was mostly alone in this endeavor. I lost interest in dumb things and my friends lost interest in me. My car ceased to be the vehicle that carried us all around town and began being the place I would hide out reading in during lunch period just to escape the beastly cacophony that is a high school campus.

It was the car I used to drive away from that campus one day just before the pandemic, not knowing it would be the last. It was the car I piled all of my things into on the day I moved into college, the one I parked on sketchy streets of downtown San Diego for the year I worked at that restaurant, and the one I piled different, but the same things back into on the day I finished college and drove out of that world I had only just driven into.

It has been with me throughout my coming of age. It has witnessed every mirror check before a date, every meltdown, every fit of laughter, every boyfriend and best friend who sat passenger side. It has taken me through my world, transporting me everywhere I ever needed to go. 

It can’t take me to this next one.

I was driving home as the sun set the other day, golden light spilling like orange juice across the interstate in a pool so ephemeral and rich that you want to dive into it, when I realized that it might be the the last time. The last time I would drive alone through the California light in that car.

As the road invariably ran beneath the tires, I felt a piece of me leave my body, staying right there in that pool of orange for one moment longer.

I grew hyper aware of my hands on the wheel, my foot on the gas, just as if I were learning all over again in a full circle moment. I wanted to say thank you.

Thank you for those six years.

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