My Car

That I have

My poor girl Jasmine is gone and I can’t bear to be apart from her not even for a second not even for a day.

Jasmine, my teal Toyota Corolla was born in 2005, she could be my younger sister but she’s not, she’s my car. She’s mouthy, or, she would be if she was my sister. In car terms I guess you would say she’s loud. So loud that when I make a phone call while driving I’m consistently greeted with:

“I can’t really hear you.”

Jasmine likes being part of the conversation, I like that. When I’m driving her I can hear the city crunch and scream. I can feel the city too, every bump. Driving her feels like running.

Jasmine is named Jasmine because I used to return from the Glendale Whole Foods parking lot with arms full of star jasmine clippings and fill her to the brim. Nobody at the Glendale Whole Foods is really paying attention to the parking lot or if anyone is cutting jasmine out of it. The flowers would hotbox Miss J in an intoxicating warm white musk for 12 hours, then die on the dot. One summer I took so much you could see my path through the median.

Jasmine was a big fat I’m sorry gift from an ex boyfriend, Jasmine and an emerald bracelet and a bad painting that’s collecting dust under my bed. My second week in LA we picked her up in Sylmar from the parking lot of a Mexican Ethiopian diner and I was like “What the fuck?” in reference to the diner options and he was like “This is California.” and I didn’t really fuck with his tone, he wasn’t in awe enough or something.

I put over 100,000 miles on Jasmine in 3 years. She has seen me through everything, there are emergency nuts in her center console and a postcard of a giant desert hairy scorpion duct taped to the passenger side dash to hide a mysterious stain. There’s sharpie and coffee and palo santo ash all over the seats and one perfect cigarette burn so mortifying I never ever ever ever lit up in her again.

Jasmine is my freedom and my world. She got swallowed up in Monday’s flood and a nice man named Luis is disassembling her in his front yard in Lincoln Heights right now, the sewer water molded quick. Luis says he’s been getting more flood cars lately, and as the climate intensifies I wonder how busy he’ll become. Jasmine was born the year Katrina hit.

When I was driving her out of the flood, dodging confused Waymos, I was reminded of my biggest childhood fantasy; floating down a river in a raft. Jasmine I miss you, come back soon, I found something further down the bank that smells sooooo sweet.