Caroline, My Girl

I had a white Jeep then. She was nearly 20 when I owned her and her skeleton creaked and her hips ground into themselves and she spoke loud and angry to anyone within earshot. I named her Caroline and she was my girl.

It was fall and I had taken to driving and burning half a pay check to kill time and set my mind in place and think out stories and songs and just enjoy the road. Heavy coat on and blue and green air fresheners clipped to the vents. I had no idea what the scents were but that didn't matter. Me and my girl.

The sky was the slow and oppressive November grey and under we moved quick along the back state routes of Washington County. Land of farms and county fairs and not the vague civilization of home and not the familial embrace of Vermont, just a land in the middle. Purgatory. It made sense that this was where I'd drive to clear my head or fill my head. 

Scientific Maps were a band from Albany that had put out a lo-fi record that I had stumbled upon and listened to constantly, and was then. It filled the jeep, end to end and wiped the inside of my brain of the film of work and the mud of all that had happened in the spring, and clay of how to fix everything. Get it back to where it needed to be. I had to forgive. I had to move forward. "Hold on, whoever you are," they sang.

I was never a man for forgiveness. I knew it was a quality I should have had, but I didn't and most of that ride I stared absently at the long yellow and dashed yellow lines stretching and bending in front of me and weighing the past, the face, the stories, the future. 

What matters? I thought. What matters?

Sex? Does sex matter? One part of me asked.

No, another answered.

Love? Does love matter?

Sometimes.

Trust?

Do I need it to?

I think so.

Caroline took me further from home and closer to the border.

I could afford the apartment. The car. The bills. I could stand the room on the mattress and the silence in the air. I could even fantasize the adventures opened without walls or restrictions or loyalties and that brought with it a temptation to burn it all down. To pick up the phone. Declare. Buy a thirty rack, head home and kick my feet up. Justified and fresh. Free and alone.

Do you want to?

I don't know. Maybe.

In the vibrations through my bones I could feel parts of Caroline grinding, only a little then, but soon I knew they'd be harder and thicker and more expensive. I could afford the apartment and the bills and I thought the loneliness, but I doubted the repairs. 

Money has no place in love.

I know. 

I let the thought disappear.

I needed a drink and a few minutes later I pulled into a gas station and parked and let the song finish and turned off Caroline.

Sex doesn't matter.

Love matters to me.

Trust matters.

I knew then that it was on me. I knew then that I would buy a drink, maybe a bag of chips, and I'd get back in Caroline, and I'd drive home and I'd walk through the door and I'd declare. 

It's work, I'd say.

Work I always intended to do. Let's go to work!

And I did.

I did.