Wednesday (Fiction) Story Tellin' (Make up Assignment)

The Honda Fit

It seemed rather ridiculous that she still scanned the roads for his brown-black 1991 Volkswagon Jetta upon entering the city limits of her childhood hometown. Most of the time her rational mind added up the facts before any stomach drop pangs or double glances into the car windows of similar looking vehicles could occur. Most of the time she reasoned herself out of nostalgia. It was he, after all, who had been the emotional one in their duo- the poet, the taker-of-walks-at-midnight-in-snow, the hand holder, the roof-climber-to-tap-on-her-window. Sitting in the quiet of a snow saturated park at midnight: she counted stars and he created millenial constellations. Yes, she added up facts and he dreamed in and between the spaces where truth and perception lay. 

It seemed odd to be considering him on Christmas Eve with her two children sitting behind her in their car seats, gabbing and babbling away with the Christmas songs he used to tease her for loving. It was impossible for him to be here in this town let alone this state or even this flat, flat region of the country. Her mind was slow today and she blamed it on her pregnancy. She was nine weeks pregnant and vulnerable to prolonged naps, hash brown binging, evening vomiting, and, apparently, nostalgia.

She grasped for logic.

She knew he moved to northern California almost a decade ago. A once-upon-a-time-ago friend wrote to her when she was at college that he packed the Jetta up with all his belongings the same month his parents move back south. She wondered if the hooded sweatshirt he had never returned to her was packed in one of the boxes. She imagined the weathered gray sweatshirt- something they playfully fought over during the entirety of their relationship- bumping and tossing itself against his belongings as he weaved over mountain passes and through the desert. She decided the friend who had written her sounded all too smug in her letter. The I know something you don't know about someone who you once knew everything.

She also could not imagine that the Jetta would ever pass any emissions test to be legal for the road. She wondered where his car now resided- probably among heaps of metal and bent car doors- almost as much as she wondered where he too resided. Had he finally matured to a point in time where he no longer slept on just a mattress tossed on the floor but a real bed with a frame and maybe (probably not but maybe?) a headboard? 

As she pulled through the small but festive downtown, a white Honda Fit met her at a four way stop sign. She signaled him to go ahead through the intersection and for a second, she saw his profile. His roman nose and a beard now and a stocking cap was headed in the direction of his parent's old house. Logic was not on her side. There was no emergency pull-off route to push off the grief (and ridiculousness!) Instead it reasoned A Honda Fit... hmm... that would be something I could imagine him driving these days and His father wore a beard. It would make sense that he would too. She blamed these thoughts on the growing being inside her womb and chose not to follow the Fit out of pure curiousity. 

She did wonder why his presence dominated an entire town that she had spent over 25 years of her life in when he had only spanned three of those years at her side. How could every intersection, every landmark, every back road that could be taken as a route from his home to hers, every space where a bar that used to reside (but did not exist now) hold such a strong presence sixteen years later and how was it that no other memory was so powerful in that town? Her friends all joked about the concept of "baby brain" and it had never affected her at home, with the children, at the advertising studio where she worked. That Christmas Eve, for the first time, she cursed it.

Later that evening after the children were spoiled by her parents and the van was packed up with chocolate Santas, large Legos, Play Mobile people, two sleeping toddlers, and a pointsetta (a family traditional gift her parents gave her every year which he had once wrapped in a 25 strand of Christmas lights), she started her drive back to the interstate. Pausing at the four way stop sign, she waited for one or two moments more than necessary, checking both directions for the beaming headlights of a Honda Fit.