Yesterday a woman from an auto body shop told me my insurance company had deemed my car a total loss.

My first thought was oh fuck now I need a car. My second thought was…my car….

I didn’t really think about losing my car that entire day though. I went to work and started prepping for a new car hunt. I laughed. I ate a few carrots. I had coffee. I smiled when a cool song came on the radio. But later that night, I fell apart.

My very first new car, the one I’d gotten as a 21 year old, the one I’d made payments on for five years, my first real investment as an adult, was gone. It all suddenly became very emotional. I started sifting through all of the memories in my head, how I’d cried when I’d gotten it, how I’m crying upon losing it, how it got me through college, got me to work, protected me through all of the young and foolish decisions to drive home drunk in my early twenties. How it loved me and never gave me any grief. How old friends and I had drank in it, slept in it, and buried peanut butter m&m’s deep within the seats of it.

It’s amazing to me how connected we become to things, and how material everything is.  Nothing is permanent, but there’s a lingering sense that everything we own will somehow stay with us until we’re no longer here. It goes the same for people of course. When my dad died back in 2011, I marveled at our connection to the physical, how important and infinite it all seems when you’re experiencing it, and how unreal it later feels because absolutely everything goes away. Our relationships, our things, our pets. How savory everything becomes once this impermanence sets in.

I’ve completely gone off track, but it’s allowed, I think.

What I’m trying to say is, developing an attachment to things and people is like getting some weird patch sewn into your arm over the span of years and years. With each passing year, the stitches get sewn deeper and deeper, and then suddenly, out of no decision of your own, the patch gets ripped out. And the longer it’s been there, the more the separation hurts. Because it’s grown on you, become a part of you, and now it’s been savagely ripped off. And the blood drips down your arm like you wouldn’t believe, and the gaping wound stings when the air touches it. And the blood continues to drip and drip and of course no one feels it or sees it but you.

And you’re supposed to enter coffee shops this way, and ask people how their days are going. As if the wound didn’t exist at all.

I’m not trying to compare losing my car to losing a loved one, only attempting to describe a feeling.

This morning I went to the body shop to remove the last few items from my car before it was taken to a junk yard. I sat in the front seat, roved my fingers over the steering wheel and radio console, thinking that I never imagined that my last time cruising down the freeway in this car would be my last time riding in it. It all seemed so unreal that the dashboard and the seat belt and the floor mats and the passenger seat and the glove compartment and the tiny crack in the windshield would all be things that I’d never see again. They were mine!

I felt angry then, like someone was walking off of a cliff in my favorite pair of boots. This wasn’t theirs to take. It was my seat and my steering wheel and my parking brake.

I found pennies and pens in the compartments near the radio. Sudafed from ages ago. A pile of pay stubs in the door compartment. A shit ton of CDs. A bra. Old jewelry. Perfume in the glove compartment. My GPS in the middle console. This car was lived in. It was used. It was loved. It was mine.

One of the guys at the shop brought me a plastic trash bag and I threw everything inside.

“You can leave the trash in there, you know?” he said. “Like anything that’s trash, you can just leave it in there.”

Oh okay, I thought. I could just leave stuff in there. Great. Except this was my trash from my car! It belonged to me! It was bad enough I couldn’t take the car with me, now he wants me to leave all of the trash in it? I know, forming relationships with trash isn’t scoring me points with any of you right now.

Finally, I sat in the front seat awhile and had a long look at the backseat. I tried to think of something to say to my Emery (that was her name), some last goodbye, some apology for how all this ended up. All I could see in my head was a person sitting by the bedside of someone who’s life was about to end, holding their hand, trying to muster up some kind of  ‘see you soon.’ I drew a blank. Except for a quote from a workbook I just read recently, about letting go. It goes:

We let go and breathe, releasing all that is old and no longer serves us…

It did help.

I ended up with two large bags of stuff, and one box from the trunk. I carried the two big bags to my rental car, then on the way back for the box, I was surprised to see one of the guys that worked there carrying it out for me. I wanted to cry when I saw him carrying this big box of my car stuff away from my car. He set it carefully in the trunk of my rental, and it was the fucking kindness that got me tearing up. The kindness that always finds me when I’m in a tortured state.

“Thanks,” I said to the guy. “Thank you so much.”

I went back to my car anyway, one last time to peer inside. I leaned my forehead on the passenger window and whispered, “Thank you. I’m sorry.”

And as I walked away, I swore I saw my 21 year old self in the driver’s seat, driving it slowly away from the Toyota dealership, all smiles.

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Monique Muro

Monique is an exceedingly happy human from LA. She runs the blog A Novel Quest, and writes. A lot.

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