The Car Around the Corner

I was parked on a side street with the engine off, waiting for his ex to finish collecting her things from the house I was about to pretend was normal.

He told me to wait around the corner. Not on the drive. Not where she might see. Around the corner. Like a secret. Like something that needed managing.

I was eighteen. He was older. He was in a band and he had that thing. That energy that makes a room rearrange itself when he walks in. I’d had a boyfriend. A decent one. But decent doesn’t compete with electric. Not when you’re eighteen and your entire understanding of love has been built on unpredictability.

So I left the decent one. Walked straight out of something stable and into the passenger seat of chaos. And I called it passion because I didn’t have better language yet.

The car was cold. It was autumn, I think. I remember my hands on the steering wheel and the particular quality of waiting. That alertness. That performing calm while your stomach does something awful. Watching the clock. Watching the road. Waiting for a woman I’d never met to leave so I could enter a life that was already lying to me.

I should have driven away.

That thought arrived years later. Not in the moment. In the moment I was in love and in awe and convinced that being chosen by someone like him meant I was finally worth something. The ugly duckling, suddenly seen. Finally, finally seen.

What I couldn’t see, parked on that side street with my hands going numb, was that being hidden is not the same as being chosen.

He texted. “She’s gone. Come in.”

And I went in.

That was the first compromise. There would be hundreds more. The groupies I’d find out about later. The prostitutes. The abortion he’d celebrate like a narrow escape while I bled on his bathroom floor.

But right then, around that corner, engine off, heart going. I thought this was the start of something.

It was. Just not what I imagined.