The car on the car port like a dead fish

 

 

November 4, 1985

 

So Monday arrives and passes, and she hasn’t come back.
This is about six hours after she said she would arrive and still no sign of her.

I see her boyfriend’s car outside my window – it looks like a dead fish in the driveway: no license plate in front, bald tires all around with a spare tire somehow attached to the top.

It amazes me how little she has actually changed in all these years, and how the one I knew from back then could easily take the place of this one, and despite the years of so called experience – know no difference.

She ages like everybody else, but fundamental change does not occur – except those changes forced upon her by circumstance, changes that sneak past her basic characteristics, but fail to change the way she lives her life.

She retains the façade of innocence I knew back then. But time has reshaped her into something more of a housewife than the party animal she once was.

But she still has no real sense of herself, packing up her whole existence for even small trips the way she did for larger ones when young.

She comes off as and maybe really is a simple-hearted soul, struggling to find some small measure of happiness.

She was never the cocaine-headed club girl many mistook her for, although the real danger men face is mistaking her for that wholesome, farm-girl she portrays. She is that and so much more, and always when men take up with the former, they get shocked when they find the rest, and run away.

She keeps talking about living out in the woods somewhere, and the simple life she really doesn’t completely understand – but shifts from one place to another with no real roots in any place.

She is never satisfied. But she rarely has a single goal, but fluctuates, seeking this and that like a child who get attracted to one shinny thing only to get drawn to another, changing places of residence, jobs and men when they grow too burdensome.

At one time, she earned as much as $1,000 a week on what she calls “date nights,” and squandered it as fast as she earned it, and thus squandered the dream of her life in the woods she could have used that money to get.

Now, she has abandoned her latest boyfriend’s car in the car port outside the window of my cold water flat in Passaic and I’m left to wonder if she will ever come back to reclaim it, or has she once more moved on, forgetting the small details of a life she always sees as history, while she searches for some new dream – she knowing perfectly well, I will always be here waiting if and when she decides she needs me again.