Boys and their cars.

I'm not a car-girl. I don't care what you drive. I find your beater car adorable. I don't like you better for your Camero. Actually, I almost prefer that you drive a beater car just so you'll be sure that it's you I'm really interested in.
But I do pay attention to what you drive. I have its image burned in my brain, from watching you drive away from every date, every occasion where I got to see you, so I could blow you a kiss just before you left my sight. It is probably little rituals like this one that make break-ups so difficult. They essentially insure that I fall harder for you than you do for me. They do not guard my heart. And when you have broken it, your car haunts me for months, maybe longer.
Six years later, I am well over a certain relationship but I still do an automatic double-take at the retreating tail of any classic Buick. The Beach Ford sticker no longer makes me sick, but it also rarely escapes my special notice. Most recently, I have become an expert in distinguishing between different types of Toyota Camrys. Each time I see one, my heart leaps up into my throat and a shiver of excited terror runs down my spine. An incredible number of people in Williamsburg drive tan Toyotas. In self-defense, I have developed a habit of scanning liscence plates and door handles before I dare glance at the driver of all tan-colored cars, even though I know that I will know his car at first glance. I cannot calm myself until I know that it is the wrong number, the wrong door handles. I am terrified of running into him, of making eye contact with him. I am frightened of answers to questions that I long to find in his eyes. How does he feel about me? What happened? What is he thinking now? Do I even cross his mind still? I am frightened because my heart is not yet unified. I still think of him, but I no longer know what I want from him. I know I want to have mattered. I don't really want what we had over again; it was stressful and hard. I mourn for what I believe we could have had. I want for him to be well and happy and whole. I fight off an irrational and illogical fear that in him I really did meet my match, and that through some fault of his or mine or both it got all screwed up and ruined and in the end it doesn't matter who is to blame-- we wind up matchless. I know that I would rather be alone than with the wrong person. My heart is just still confused about how he became the wrong person so fast. Someday, that encounter will happen. I will survive it. It won't be that bad. And I won't find answers to his heart in his eyes: I will find the last lost pieces of mine. Meanwhile, his tan Toyota Camry haunts my driving.