Memories in a Car

Fourteen years old, in the driver’s seat for the first time in my life. My white-knuckle fingers grip the wheel as I push in the clutch, turn on the car, and slowly let my foot off the break. The car rolls forward, I scream, and promptly stall the car. My patient father directs me to try again. Twenty minutes later, I’m driving tentatively past empty fields on a nearly deserted road.

Fifteen now. I’m moody, impulsive, and self-centered. I’m about to have my heart broken for the first time, but I don’t know that yet. I'm on vacation at the family cabin. I take a break from moping to practice driving with my dad. The bumpy dirt road terrifies me, but I’m too proud to admit it. I’m not paying enough attention, and have several close calls with trees. Frustrated and angry at myself for messing up and at my dad for being right when he told me to be more careful, I storm away into the trees as soon as we get back.

Another year passes. In the picture on my new license I'm tan and blonde from the summer sun. I look young and care-free because I am. In the next year, everything is going to go just right for me. My dad will get a new car, so his old one-- the Nissan Sentra I started out in two years ago-- will be mine. I’ll have great friends and even a boyfriend. Most of my time will be spend smiling and laughing. I won't be close enough to the pain of life for it to affect me, or to even understand it. Sometimes I still long for those innocent days driving from one happy place to another.

Seventeen and it's senior year. It starts with change and people moving on. I struggle with that, but find enjoyment as a section leader in the marching band. Countless hours are spent parked on the side of the road with one of my trumpet players (not always the same one) in the passenger seat telling me about his life. Almost all of them are fifteen, and just like me at that age. I am the wise older sister figure that they all have a little bit of a crush on, and I love that role.

Marching band ends. Winter begins, and I spiral downward. The only thing colder than the frigid air is my soul. A long relationship runs its course, and even though I know it’s for the best, my heart feels the pain of a ragged hole where love used to be. I drive home from school day after day, sobbing to the radio or to my own silence. I drive in circles past places full of memory or park on the side of the road and wonder how I came to this. I sit behind the wheel of my motionless car, stuck inside of myself. I feel so much emotion some days that I feel ready to explode. Other days I feel so much nothing that even pain is a welcome guest. I have met the darker, sadder side of the human mind; not only in myself, but in the people I love the most. I want so much to take away their pain, but it’s impossible. I come to understand the deep penetration of depression. It’s a despair that doesn't have to have a cause or a reason to persist, but it does, and it tears you apart from the inside. 

When I'm all alone, it is the most present. When I step outside of my car and into the school or my house, I wipe it from my face, but I can see when I look into the mirror that the luster has gone from my eyes. I don't know how or who to ask for help, so I don't. I just turn into a shell of myself and try not to let my inner demons hurt anyone else. I keep them to myself and only let them out when I'm driving all alone. I hardly know who I am anymore.

Another year later my car takes me away from home to a dorm on a college campus. I walk to class every day, but still make excuses to drive. Today, another year later, I'm someone different than anyone I've ever been. I'm not care-free. I'm not empty. I'm not scraping rock-bottom. I have learned so much from a summer that brought me back to life and almost two semesters of college. There are still days or even weeks when the depression and anxiety creep up and swallow me whole, but I've learned how to snuggle with my demons more often than wrestle with them. There has been new love found and lost, new hurt, new struggles, new joy. There are new roads to drive on and a lot of figuring out who I am.

All alone in my car I roll down the windows and let the wind leave me breathless and feeling utterly alive. I sing the words on the radio or the ones in my head, pray earnestly, or just think aloud. Between my starting point and destination, anything can change.

And, as the memories in my car testify, everything does.