2012 Honda Fit
i miss people when they're right in front of me
I called M five hours into the drive and said, as soon as she answered, “is it possible to die of boredom?” I think she said yes, because that sort of tracks with our general shared stance on life, which is that some people are dead even while they’re alive, mostly because they’re killing themselves with boredom, or fear, or whatever, and then we talked for a few hours, which, thank god, because truly, I was dying of boredom.
Last week I tried to drive to Penland, leaving at 6am on a Wednesday, which meant I spent some time driving in the dark. This week, this Sunday, I had it figured out. I’d leave right at sunrise, 7:17am, and make it by the time it got dark in central North Carolina. Waze put the drive at between ten and twelve hours. It took fourteen.
The first five were pretty fine. I listened to Z100, the Top 40 hosted by Carson Daly (remember Carson Daly!) and usually I hate morning radio because it’s talking, but this was just the same twelve songs I’ve been hearing on TikTok and Z100 when I drive the Honda Fit just, around, so I was happy. I felt bad for Boo, who just kept readjusting and shifting and who really likes to ride in the car with my right arm behind her body, pressed between her chest and the seat, which is of course wildly unsafe so I only let her ride like that for maybe ten seconds every four hours, if traffic is good. I got out of the city almost immediately, without any drama, and then avoided the Turnpike entirely, getting onto the 81, which I followed through what felt like nineteen states. The Fit was in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland (!!), Tennessee (??) and then finally, North Carolina.
We stopped twice, once before Boo threw up her breakfast and so I could get a pumpkin cream cold brew and then once after Boo threw up her breakfast and so I could get a salted caramel cream cold brew and a bacon gruyere egg bite, and then once again to drive through at Bojangles, about two hours from Penland. After M and I talked on the phone my friend T called, and we talked for about an hour, about life and boundaries and stuff, and then there was some drama with the Airbnb and then I thought, I can’t talk on the phone any more, but then my friend J texted and asked how the drive had been so I called her and said, “I live in this car now, I have become one with the car, the car and I are one, I will never not be in this car, this car is my life now.”
My therapist often catches me going to extremes as a way of avoiding my actual discomfort. I’ll say something like, well, what if P is actually a psychopathic narcissist and he’ll murder me and she’ll say, well, that’s pretty extreme, what’s the actual discomfort, and it’ll be something like, oh no, what if I am in love and I am getting it wrong, again. Or I’ll say something like, maybe I’m actually a horrific writer, like I can barely string a sentence together, like my writing is getting worse and worse and worse, and I’ll never publish again, and she’ll say, okay, that’s pretty extreme, and then I’ll say, well, sometimes I think I could be better at writing than I am and it feels like it’s gonna be hard to get there.
Obviously I didn’t live in the car but there was some safety in just saying that I do now. The internet BDSM Test says I trend submissive, which seems true, because I love to just submit to things, love to just fully surrender, just release all responsibility, all sense of agency, just accept that I live in the car now. Once, on a very long drive from Palm Springs back to Oakland, once the drive started feeling really intolerably long, I had the persistent intrusive thought that I should just double back to Palm Springs and then drive back, that I should basically trap myself on the I-5 forever, that I should somehow, just before the moment of arrival, delay it. I would say that 99% (there I go again) of my desire drive has to do with delayed gratification, with never quite getting what I want, with halving and halving and halving again the distance between where I am and where I'm going. I miss people when they’re right in front of me; I want them to hold me while they’re holding me; I cannot ever have enough, there is never enough, I am always on my way, I am never quite getting there, I will never quite land, I will never quite arrive.
J and I talked for an hour or so about how hard it is sometimes to just be a person who has fears, aka a person, and I narrated my Bojangles experience to her, and then it got dark because somehow I’d added two hours to the trip just with those two stops, or it was the leaf traffic, or, or, or, and so the last two hours was me in the dark driving through the woods of Tennessee, no cell service, thankfully Waze still worked, having a very hard time seeing (I have a pretty bad astigmatism and am overdue for an eye exam), with locals tailgating me, with it being hard to pull over because I couldn’t see if something was a driveway or a ditch, but I just put my headphones in and put Billie Eilish on and I just tried to focus, and I kept focusing, and then I was here, and P was standing on top of a grassy knoll and I parked, and then I walked up the hill, and I walked to him, and I had arrived.
The 2012 Honda Fit exists in multiple locations.