Making Space for New Passengers

It’s amazing how little time it takes for the crazy to become normal.

You can be having a completely normal life and then, boom, stuff starts happening. The right rear burner on your stove quits working. The front door only locks from the inside. Your boyfriend leaves notes on your car threatening suicide. Your defroster doesn’t work so your car windows frost inside and you have to use a scraper on them while you are driving.  Police come to your door and ask unpleasant questions. You stay up all night worrying about something bad happening. You don’t know what the bad thing is, it could be anything. The bad thing floats around the room like a three-day old balloon.

Pretty soon, you are driving around town with the back seat of your car crammed with old newspapers and magazines, gum wrappers from bubblegum chewed ten years ago, mittens still wet from snow, and diapers new and crisp in the box. You are loathe to have a passenger lest they ask about the back seat. “What is all that stuff back there?” You shrug.

One day, you’ll go to the car wash. There will be a line of cars behind you but you won’t care. You’ll pull up to the vacuum and open all your doors. The stuff in the back seat will start falling out and you will pick it up and throw it in the trash. The more that falls out, the more you throw away and, pretty soon, you are vacuuming the back seat, scraping the stuck bubblegum off with your fingernails. You decide you need some ice to freeze the bubblegum so it’s easier to scrape off. It will be a project for Saturday.

You look at the stuff in the trash barrel. It comes almost to the brim. This was your stuff but you decide to leave it there where it could be anyone’s stuff, where it can be anonymous, owned by strangers, not by you. And you drive away, naked, looking back into the swept and shorn back seat, wondering how it came to be that you filled it with so much stuff.

And then you look for people who might need a ride.

__________

Creative Nonfiction

Originally published in 2019

Photo by Dane Deaner on Unsplash