parts
Yesterday my car was in the shop again, for the second time this year. First thing in January it needed a new oxygen sensor and something else-- I forget what. When you've had a car for sixteen years it all blends together, the dead batteries and the broken radiator and the time steam started billowing out from under the hood in terrible traffic and I couldn't find a place to pull over and park and figure out what the fuck was happening. The car is a 1999 Honda Civic, which made the oxygen sensor its 20th birthday present.
My parents bought the car for me for my sixteenth birthday, with the understanding that they would not be buying me another one. This one was sturdy and dependable and it would run as long as I took care of it, so I should learn to take care of it. I did. I've known my mechanic for nearly a decade, and he agrees: every time I bring the car to him, sputtering and busted, he says "you know, this thing will run forever if you keep taking care."
Except when I came in January he said, "this thing will run forever if you keep taking care of it, but also, I wouldn't take it on any more road trips." (The oxygen sensor had announced itself on the 10, somewhere between Banning and Cabazon, heading into the no man's land of Desert Hot Springs and then Joshua Tree, where cell reception is sparse to non-existent. It was the Sunday of a holiday weekend. Oxygen sensors aren't that big of a deal, but if something else had run out on that road on that day, I could have been pretty fucked.)
Sixteen years is a long time to own a car. Once I started working after college people would ask if I was thinking about upgrading it, and the answer was always no. Sometimes I didn't have the money, and other times I just didn't want to. I didn't see the need. The car moved across the country with me when I lived in Connecticut; I drove it home to Los Angeles when I moved back. It's been with me through several major depressive episodes, my high school and college graduations, the death of my last remaining grandparent, every breakup I've ever had. I had it when I was an events coordinator, and a substitute teacher, and through a lot of unemployment, and on the days I sold my first, second, third and fourth novels. It is one of very, very few things that has stayed constant in my life from 16 to 32, an unbroken line that connects the girl I was the first time I drove out of view of my parents' house to the woman who hasn't lived there in years.
When I pull my tarot cards recently, they come up the same almost every time: Death, and the Ten of Swords, and sometimes The Tower, if whatever's out there really wants to hammer the point home. Things are changing. Things are ending. There's no way to negotiate around it. There's nothing to do but accept it.
I've now been freelancing longer than I ever held any of my full-time jobs; I made more money writing last year than I ever did in an office. I recently asked for a break from a long, much-loved friendship that hurt too much to keep close anymore. And for the first time in sixteen years, my car started breaking, and I didn't automatically default to the stopgap option of fixing whatever broke and waiting for the next thing to start rattling or gasping. I had the money and the time and the space in my mind to say, you know, as much as I have loved this thing, I am ready for a fresh start.
The car is a fact and the cards are-- not a metaphor, but a symbol. More complicated than that. Both are encouraging me to see how much has changed, and to stop trying to hold on to things I don't need anymore. To live in this moment, in which I am very lucky, and very happy, and everything's changing, and you have no idea how much I hate change. (Capricorn sun, Taurus rising, double earth sign, obsessively grounded.) To take a risk and spend some money; to take a risk and ask for what I want, even though I'm not sure how badly I need it; to take a risk and admit that things are good in part because I have worked hard to make them this way. And to know I'm allowed to trust an instinct, because being scared is not the same thing as not being ready.
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I've also, while all this has been happening, been trying to hit two book deadlines scheduled almost right on top of one another. (One is done, and the other will be on Monday, so help me god.) During this time I've been trying to do as little freelancing as possible, but I do have some new pieces up that were in process before I went on hiatus: one is a personal essay about how my dad started his career shooting "nudie cuties," and how his life and the world of pornography have evolved since then. I also wrote a little thing for the same site about the different ways men have found to look at women's naked bodies.
Then I interviewed Ann Leckie about her first fantasy novel, The Raven Tower; we talked about tradition, religion, and how the "anxiety of influence" is actually something only people from privileged literary traditions have to worry about.