I remember when it was just a chevy. A thing to get you from place to place. It had a name. And it was no superhero. But you treated it like one. Like the greatest goddamn thing to ever guzzle a gallon of gasoline. And you patted the interior, talked to it, made it feel special, and no wonder. Your life wrapped into this goddamn thing. This one goddamn thing that seemed to define you. Why did you let that one thing define you?

But this is forgetting rum. And Coca-Cola and ROTC and the times you woke me from sleep because when I’m sick I snore, so I had to be woken with a fever, with a fever of one hundred and two, and I slept in the hallway, slept terribly in the hallway of the dormitory, waiting for morning so I could actually sleep, when you’d gone off to class. God how I hated you. Have never hated anyone so much as I hated you that day. Insufferable and unforgiving.

But today, as I remember, you and your car, the Beat Bomb, the Chevynova, I say my prayers that when I say “I forgive you,” there is not an ounce of irony in my voice, in my intent, in my forgiveness, because I know too how much, just how very much, every day I need to be forgiven for things I don’t even know I’ve done, and never will.

Let’s agree, I don’t know you, and you don’t know me, and we’ll go, we’ll become whatever it is we become. Me this. Me this now. And some day, if we get so far as that, perhaps grace.

So much depends upon

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