conversing with cars and people.

Today my car was doing just fine, chugging away on this hot August day, when suddenly it was all, “I don’t really feel like blowing cold air on you anymore.” And I try to be a reasonable person, try not to demand too much of those around me, so I just rolled down my windows and kept on going.

Maybe the poor thing was tired, after all.

But then my car was like, “Actually? I don’t really feel like going faster than twenty miles per hour anymore, either, so, yeah.”

And that’s when I, once again, tried to be reasonable. “But car,” I said, addressing it by name, letting it know that I was serious, “this is a forty-five mile per hour zone…”

But, nothing.

Because it kept just getting really moody right above twenty miles per hour. And then it would start lurching forward and back, like it was doing its best impersonation of one of those wooden roller coasters climbing up up up, right before the big drop. And actually, considering that my car has never been on a wooden roller coaster, I was kind of impressed.

But then I remembered how my therapist is working with me on being able to say that some things that happen are not okay. You know, boundaries, and all that. So I mustered up my courage and told my car that no, this was not gonna work for me. This was, in fact, not okay.  Sure, you can not blow cold air anymore–that, I can handle–but you do have to go faster than a horse and buggy, cause mama needs to get to Trenton tomorrow and that ain’t exactly Amish country.

And then I coaxed it to the auto shop and my pop picked me up and all in all, I think my therapist would be proud.

—————-

Life has no script, have you noticed? And sometimes I don’t think I am very good at improvisation. Sometimes, I say strange things. But usually, this is in response to even stranger things, I think.

Like today. I was standing in the mall, texting, so I was pretty much oblivious to the world around me.

“I was captivated by your unique sense of style, so I had to come say hi to you,” I suddenly hear, close to my ear. Too close to my ear, actually. I look to my left and there’s a man. And he’s the one who is responsible for the whispery words that are too close to my ear. I am startled; he is smiling.

“So…? What’s going on?” he asks.

And then, I do not answer his question, which I suppose would be normal. I simply say, “Oh! Thank you!” rather loudly and awkwardly and then start walking away, pretty fast, I might add.

And then I look down at my unique style, so to speak. Black tank top, flowered shorts, and a pair of brown and black boots are not all that rare, I think. And as I keep walking the opposite direction from the man to whom I really don’t wanna tell what’s going on, I see someone I sort of know but, well–maybe this is mean–don’t feel like talking to.

I think this might be a Latshaw thing. Because, my brother Jason used to bicycle around town WEARING A POLAR HOOD . And no, he didn’t do this because the town was called The North Pole. He’d do this in August, folks. And no, not because he was on his way to rob a bank, either. It was for the express purpose of being able to bike around undetected by people he knew, and would therefore avoid having to talk to anybody. Unless, of course, he chose to and I suppose then it would be something like the moment when Clark Kent reveals he is really Superman. And when Jase ripped off his polar hood in front of you, you’d be in the hallowed circle of trusted friends who knew the true identity of that masked bicyclist.

Sometimes you just wanna stay anonymous, I guess. Sometimes you just wanna walk in the mall and not talk to people. Sometimes you realize that you’re an introvert, but don’t get me wrong, because you do love people. You just don’t always want to talk to them.

So I see this person, and then turn on my heels and go back the other way. And then I see the man who was intrigued by my unique sense of shorts-and-a-tank-top-cause-nobody’s-ever-worn-that-before!

So I am caught in mall pergatory for a little while, wondering wear to go, wondering what to do.

Until I see  my opportunity to sneak on by because that man–the intrigued and whispery one–is on his phone and therefore distracted and I can finally leave and I didn’t have to resort to wearing a polar hood and I think that would have actually made it worse because if you add a polar hood on top of what I was already wearing, well then, that man would have really had a point about my unique sense of style, after all, wouldn’t he?