Existential Crisis at the Car Dealership
I have exited more than a few cars a far
different person than the one who entered—
my mother’s baby blue minivan, parked at the barn-
turned-bar where she met my father
& stepmother every weekend to exchange children;
Monty’s ’92 Corolla, peeling away from our dark
school’s auditorium, our delinquent laughter drowning
out the alarms sounding in our wake;
Kayla’s mother’s SUV, borrowed without asking,
our bodies in the backseat bathed
in the refracted light of a patrolman’s gun.
With proper maintenance this car will last you
twenty years, Tim says, his salesman’s mustache
unveiling two teeth of which the August sun makes
a useless mirror as I do the math: I have—neglect
misfortune, the miracles of technology & the terror
of reincarnation aside—two more cars until I die.
I didn’t know whether to feel more like a god
or His kickshaw after learning about the uncertainty
principle in sophomore physics—the observer
effect: how protons from a flashlight’s beam harangue
an electron into a new state. Point: reality unfolds
for us. Counter: we unfold unwillingly for others.
How else to measure? Today, my mother is on her last
car, three states away, or the north-south length of ancient
Mesopotamia, one trek through civilization & back
to a time when cars weren’t needed to reach mothers
& time moved differently, maybe. Some ancient
calendars only held 360 days, the other five days off
the clock, unaccounted for, unscripted
but, I imagine, still passed, like the thirteenth
floor in the minds of superstitious architects.
Today, Tim tells me, it’s go, go, go, 24/7, 365, 65 miles
per hour, 6% off the sticker price & you have yourself
a deal. Beginning junior year, I traded myself
between parents’ houses, packing my near-death
’84 Astro Van with clothes & CDs & my sister
& driving as slowly as possible to our next home
where we would sit in the driveway before going in,
waiting for the engine to stop rattling, the exhaust
to stop hissing, the body to settle into stillness,
until the shocks of light behind my clenched
eyes would dissolve & the space between
two lives would swallow us whole.
No one wants to clean the dishes
& it’s been three weeks now, the sink a man-made cenote,
a ceramic statue of sludge.
Tonight, I scooped cereal with the cap from a milk carton,
read the nutrition label three times in place
of the biographies of missing children
that took up that space when I was their age,
in the nineties, their black & white faces a reminder:
the greatest denial is absence.
The first time I went surfing, a rip tide smuggled me
out to where the sun & moon tug-of-war
with the hulls of fishermen’s capsized boats & future
waves gather in the back of a dolphin’s throat.
As I floated, I made lists of everything I had
ever learned: long division, the French Revolution,
how to stop
drop & roll & when to breath
inside the mouth of an unconscious person.
That was when mom still insisted on cleaning
the dishes herself.
After dinner, we handed her our licked-clean plates
like porcelain credit cards & ran into the dark
to play hide & seek. Now, when I visit,
nurses serve us small cuts of turkey
on picnic plates.
She carries a knapsack to every meal, filled with copies
of old recipes penciled on two-by-four inch notecards.
She leaves one on the table for the chef.
Soon, she will forget how she ever made caramel sauce
or to not touch a hot plate when it’s put down
or who I am. Then, we can finally eat the familiar
meal for the first time,
talk about how the first bites taste different
after a sip of Riesling, & be freed from cleaning up,
from carting each other around like gold
medalists who can’t let glory go.
Alex is a high school philosophy teacher in Phoenix and founder of The Grief Commune, a zine and community group focused on the politics of grief. His writing has appeared in Ghost City Review, Qu, Barely South Review, and others.