Anthropomorphism

It’s distressing, you know?

While thinking aloud, I stumbled upon an unexpected epiphany. Maybe the way I’d been taking care of you had been a roundabout way to care for myself. That certainly wasn’t the intent, but in the long term that’s how it turned out to be.

I may not have been the best at what I did for you, though I did try. I know that. I don’t think you know that. You can’t, you don’t think of things the way I do. It’s been me all along.

Leave home, return home, safe each way. So many kilometers (more than halfway to the moon!). So many years.

I quite literally could never have made it to where I am today without you, and you will never know the depths of my gratitude for the work I have perceived you to have done.

I’d barely earned my driver’s license. Fresh job, fresh license, fresh car. At least, I hoped it would be when I pulled into the driveway with my parents. Heart pounding, I looked into the faces of the kindly elderly couple (looking to sell the last of their things before moving cross country) and stammered my offer.

When Mum and I did the test drive, I was so nervous I would get into an accident on the test drive for my new car that I left the parking brake on. Good thing I’d already fallen in love with you by the time we parked out in front of the house. The previous owner reminded me to turn off the air conditioning a few minutes before getting home to prevent mold. There’s a photo of us together, he, his wife, and I, grinning and holding five thousand dollars in cash.

Buyer’s remorse hit me like a train sitting parked outside my workplace a week later. We were strangers to each other. Five thousand dollars was the largest amount of money I’d ever held in my hands, let alone traded away. Did I really need a car? Of course I did. With three siblings still in high school, the family car wasn’t going to do it anymore. I’d be working early mornings and the latest of nights. It was time; but when is anyone ever truly ready for A Big Change? Was this the car for me? Time would tell.

How many nights did you hold me while I grieved the end of high school sweethearts? How many times did we drive into town to pick up late night snacks with my sisters? We moved provinces three times, and you never so much as sputtered with disbelief at some of the deep grades we encountered in the Rockies. I have fond memories of traversing up the coast of Vancouver Island with you during the wee hours of a summer morning, bleary eyed youths bundled into your cabin stocked with snacks, determined to experience a sunrise in Tofino.

Post-pandemic, after the last move, again you held me as I gripped the steering wheel and swallowed down tears in a clothing store parking lot. I’d gone in to buy a belt. My eating disorder had flared so violently within months that my pants wouldn’t stay up anymore. No belt had a loop small enough to keep them steady. You gave me privacy to cry, to wail, to pray aloud that I’d somehow summon the fortitude to push through and learn how to eat again.

People say that once you start spending money on repairs to an aging car, the expenses usually don’t stop. I’ve been in denial for a year and a half. Hole in the HVAC causing heatless commutes during -30 degrees Celsius weather? New this? New that? Of course I’ll put the money down. I love you. I trust you. I depend on you.

It feels like a gross betrayal to finally admit that our time together will end. The way my Dad described it to me on the phone - gently as he knew how my heart would hurt - a car can be like a pet. They only last for so long, and you take care of them until it’s time to say goodbye. I’ve never had a pet of my own. But I’ve had you. Through snow and through hail, thick road and thin, to places we have never been.

How can we have experienced so much together and at the end of it, not actually be a We? You have been the one constant in my life for ten years, the longest and strongest relationship I’ve had outside of my family.

And yet, You were never really here.