Sixteen and spoiled.
There she sat in the driveway looking like everything I’d ever wanted. Brand new 2004 black Toyota Tacoma pickup truck. We both didn’t know the miles we’d cover, the friends we’d give a lift to, the spilled cheese dip on the fabric seats, but we knew that we were right for one another.
My first and only vehicle I’ve had since I was 16 years old; a fresh faced kid with the lucky break of having generous and financially strong parents. I knew that I was fortunate. Though gratitude and wisdom are very different, as I still had to learn about speeding the hard way with a future mandatory class in defensive driving after my fourth ticket going over 90 mph on an open highway. I don’t speed anymore.
I promise this isn’t a country song, but it is an ode to a truck. My truck. More a description of a feeling. Of those many summer nights driving down dirt roads with the windows open and listening to spring peepers singing to one another from afar. Taking the long way home just to sit with your own thoughts and smell the fresh air rolling in from the countryside.
This summer, I have to sell my truck. She will live out the rest of her miles with some stranger. And it’s honestly a bit strange to think about. It’s always been me and her. And now it won’t.
I’ve never been one to particularly anthropomorphize objects or hold on to things as if they were valuables. Maybe it stems from moving so much, or losing a great deal of childhood memorabilia in a flood, but to me stuff is just that… stuff. I’ve never really thought any differently about my truck in that regard. Even now, as I write, I’ve been referring to her as a she, but really it is just a vehicle.
And yet, on the brink of getting rid of her/it, I find myself strangely attached. This “thing” has been a bizarre constant in my life. She was there for my first boyfriend, the eight-year-long high school sweetheart. She was there for my ‘fuck you’ phase when I’d roll the windows down blasting Taking Back Sunday, smoking Outlaws in my aviator sunglasses. She drove me in a fearful panic to my sister’s house when we received my mother’s suicide note. She took me to Florida for my first internship. She saw the first fruits and the dying leaves of four other long term relationships. She was there for my first job, my high school then college graduation, and a career after that. She sat patiently at the library and many coffee shops as I worked on writing. She’s taken me on countless camping trips. She’s had 11 people ride at once, laughing at our own dumb, young shenanigans and she’s had just me, sobbing alone behind the wheel at heartbreak. Now, just this past weekend, she drove me home from getting married some 17 years later from seeing her for first time sitting in that driveway all shiny and new.
I’ve lost a lot of things in my life. But a dumb, inanimate truck is what ended up being a constant for me. But it isn’t really the truck at all, is it? It’s the life I’ve had with it and around it. It’s a focal point of memories, a common denominator in so many ever-changing stories. A permanent fixture in a story that has constantly evolved.
The older one gets, the more you realize how much life changes. For some people, it hardly changes at all; but for others, like me, the life you once had seems like another lifetime altogether. Then you go through two or three of those “life times”. To have something that has remained almost exactly the same in my life, a life that has been so wildly diverse and mutable, is what makes that truck so goddamn fucking special.
So while it is only a vehicle, cheers to her all the same. For being consistent. For keeping me safe. For moving SO many friends’ furniture. For the truck bed stargazing. For the reliability of having one thing in the world that was guaranteed as a personal safe space. For making me sentimental about a thing. Because sometimes, that can be a little good. And you, Tassara, were a damn good thing in my life.
Ode to my little black truck. It’s time we close this chapter together.
Goodbye truck. Goodbye Arkansas.