Ara Ara’s Mind

{AN: Changing after college was really hard. I had to face not being myself while still dealing with the things life threw at me. It felt impossible and scary and not worth it. It was agonizing, having to change and not knowing who I would become. I miss you Clive. I hope you are thriving where ever you are. Recommended listen- I Cannot Hide Myself playlist on my Spotify.}

I care about my things. My water bottle, my car, my bag, the mechanical pencil I use to write vs the one I use to clean my nails, even the sticky notes I write on at work. In many ways they are extensions of me. Ways to express myself in ways I never thought of. What happens when I have to get rid of one of my things? What does it mean?

My cat, Kim, peed on a pair of converse that were ripped and torn but signed by my friends in high school. For weeks, I have been trying to decide whether to wash them or to just throw them away. What if I wash them and the ink comes out and all the signature, all the doodles are gone? Would I just end up throwing them away anyway? I don’t need them anymore, I know that. I don’t really even want them anymore, but I can’t deny the memory they hold. I can’t deny that they have taken up, even if a little, space in my heart.

My car (Clive on the outside, Froggy Shroms on the inside; he’s a drag queen), has been totaled. Which are words that are hard to write, words that almost bring me to tears. My dad bought Clive for me in 2015 right around the time I was supposed to be learning how to drive. I didn’t drive it or was able to call it mine until I was 19-20 (2021) and moving into my first apartment. Me and Clive have seen many things. Late night drives and early pick ups from Boone. A drive to Chicago and back. Speeding on 485 to get to work in South Carolina and then Pineville after I graduated college. Long tenuous drives back home from school even though it was forty-five minutes away. Drives to family outings I didn’t want to be at. Clive drove me and my partner to Charleston after it got hit (this hit causing it’s demise). Clive has seen so many versions of me. When I religiously listened to Willow, when I would randomly want to listen to and sing every musical I knew, when I listened to Mona Leo at seven am on my way to work at Barnes and Nobel, when I transitioned to CD’s, when I left my Frank Ocean CD in and listened to it for three days straight, and even now as I get into making playlists for characters and books.

I didn’t mean to go on this long about my car, but we were never supposed to form a connection; a bond, but we did. Against everything, my anxiety, my hatred for driving, my dislike of cars, I fell in love with Clive. And despite out hiccups, the battery shifting out of place and shutting off (sometimes while I was driving), the car being unable to start from sitting too long, the idling he does even when my foot isn’t on the gas, I think Clive loved me too or at least appreciated me.

I know it’s time for Clive to leave me. I know I’ve outgrown him and the bumper stickers I’ve put on the back. I know it’s time for teh converse to leave me. The sides are torn and the soul of the shoe is coming out. I know I don’t need them and the RAT my partner wrote on the heel way back then. How do I let then go? How do I honor them? How do I treat them like things I’m loosing that I’ve had for four+ years? How do I mourn a version of myself I know needed to die? How do I honor my past while still opening myself up to the future?

I held a vigil for Clive. I lit an abundance apple crisp candle a friend gave to me, and I walked around then car talking to him. I told him that I loved him and that I hoped her lived on. That I lit the abundance for him so he may choose how he got to rest. That might not be how this goes down, but that’s the way I would like for it to. For Clive to have a say.

As for my shoes, I found that their ink was already fading and that the signatures where barely even readable. As well as the “RAT” on the heel, done in the different colored pens that I had, being unintelligible. I have decided to throw them away.

The wound is still fresh and when I lay down I know I’m going to want to rip out my heart. But I’m still excited to see what car I get next, to have a car in my name (scary), for bumper stickers and magnets, and keychains. To name the car, and to keep honoring Clive the way I see fit until he is taken from me.

I don’t know what this new car will say about me. Definitely not “cereal box” (to quote my first and only hate note about my parking). I don’t know who or what I’m becoming. I will miss who I have been deeply, but for the first time I can say this change is bittersweet.