Ode to My First Car by Robin Gow EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Robin Gow
- Language: English
- Genre: Science Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
YOU, LARS
I only had a year with you, Lars,
but it felt like
so much longer.
I know it sounds dramatic
but my life didn’t really start
until I started driving you—
those first times I didn’t have to ask
for a ride to Sophia’s house
or I could stay a little later
at band practice after school
because I wasn’t waiting
for someone to pick me up.
I technically named you
but really you named yourself.
From the start, I always thought
you looked like a “Lars.”
Sturdy
and tired.
Strong green but
not emerald green. Not showy.
A gentle and butch kind of car.
Driving home with Dad I’m asking myself,
“What the fuck am I going to do
without you, without a car?”
I keep thinking, “No no no no no—”
I can’t go back. I can’t go back
to Mom and Dad not trusting me—
asking me every little detail of my plans—
feeling always like I’m suffocating.
They had just started to really let me
make decisions and go out on my own
and now that’s all ruined. Beyond ruined.
There’s no getting you back.
You were
my grandma Jean’s car.
You were a lot like her.
She had short gray hair
and was always crouching in her garden
behind her tiny house in Oley, Pennsylvania.
When she gave you to me last year,
you still smelled like her cigarettes
and her pine air freshener still dangled
from the rearview mirror.
Now you are going
who knows where.
I wish we could have
obne more drive.
I keep trying to go backward
thinking, “What if I didn’t leave in a hurry …
What if my mind was more focused on the road …
What if I could do something
to change this?”
JUST LAST WEEK
I drove with you to get Panera with Sophia.
The Philly alternative radio station
came in all fuzzy and static but we left it playing anyway.
Sophia discovered that you had a moon roof and she said,
“Omg! Claire! There’s a roof!!!
This is so cool!”
She reached up and opened it
and the bright noontime sun poured
across our faces. Even as the trees
blocked and unblocked light,
it still felt warm on our skin. After we got food, we took the long way home.
Sophia said, “We could go anywhere you know—
we could like drive to the beach right now!”
“I think our parents would notice if we drove to the beach,”
I said, but I imagined it.
Us, in our shorts and T-shirts
parking you on the sand.
I keep thinking I wish we could have done it—
gone all the way to the beach.
Sophia is like that—always dreaming a new adventure.
I’m like—why didn’t she convince me to go?
Now it’s too late.
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