I love you, Jeepie

I had the talk with my car today.

"Remember when I first got you? I was 16. We were both just babies."

"Remember that time, a month after you came, you broke down on the side of the street a block away from home, and I ran back crying because I thought I had broken you?"

"Remember that time in college when we tried to fit 12 people in you? And someone puked on your passenger side door? I'm sorry about that."

"Remember when we missed the parking lot in San Diego and ended up in Mexico?"

"Remember when I accidentally backed you into that dumpster outside Young Orchard and my dad had to come up to campus to get you?"

"Remember when we went to Atlanta? And when you got shipped out here to LA? We both hated it at first. There were all these asshole Hummers on the road then, trying to run us off the freeway, but we held our own."

"Remember when that stoned Prius lady hit us when we were stopped at a red light at Sunset Junction minding our own business?"

"Remember those days on the beach? And that trip to Santa Barbara? And the time we got lost in Long Island and I panicked that we would never get home?"

"Also, I resent it when people call you a truck. You're not a truck. You're way prettier. And you're the best color of all the Jeeps out there too."

My car silently mocks my sentimentality. She was always the more stoic one.

But she is aging. She even smells like sea salt these days. Although that could also be leaking freon or old age or Jeep rust/corroding battery. Or it could just be the sweaty yoga mat in the back seat.

I love you car. I'll miss you. You'll always be my first. I'll never forget that.

She's ready though. I think. I don't know if I am.

She tells me to stop it. That it's hard enough this whole thing, but on top of it, I'm sentimental, and feel strongly like everything is alive in some way. And that is why I'm always apologizing for life, or specifically the way my life interjects with the lives of other people and other things. But everything is alive, and has a trajectory, a narrative, a story. And everything comes before it goes, this is the way it is. I know this. I know this. But I wish I had grown up in one of those cultures where there is no word for goodbye.