I am sitting here writing this so I won’t go to Carmax. Every time I do go, I can’t believe they let me in the door. Firstly, because in the last two years I have bought five cars and returned four. Secondly, because I gave them a one-star rating on Yelp and advised people to stay away because they pushed their Carmax Car Care on me hardcore, and it’s junk because they are always too busy to repair my car. Carmax has a policy that you can return a car for a full refund within thirty days as long as you’ve driven less than 1,500 miles. In my pursuit of the perfect car, I took full advantage of this policy. It’s too bad for Carmax they can’t screen potential buyers and weed out the ones who weren’t kept by their mothers. You pull the rug out from under an infant like that and chances are good you just seriously janked that person’s ability to make decisions easily for the rest of their lives. Do I like Toyota or Honda? Do I like blue or red? Do I like sporty or boxy? I like them all! I like none of them!

The first time around, I bought the almost-perfect car. It was a blue Honda CR-V with leather seats and a moonroof. The only problem was that it had 90,000 miles, and after a week of ownership, I started getting really worried about all those miles. Where had this car been? How had the previous owners treated it? Granted, the car came with paperwork that showed past repair history, etc., but I’d come with paperwork, too, and as almost every adopted person knows, the paperwork we arrive with is often full of lies and missing information. People generally want to adopt babies and not youngsters or teenagers for a reason: the babies are clean of history and the parents have a better sense of knowing what they are getting: a clean slate! I felt the same way about my car, but I wasn’t in the market for a clean slate.

I was on a used car budget and had shitty credit, but Carmax would still sell to me, so I had to work with what I had. I returned the Honda and bought a red Toyota Yaris, thinking I’d be a better person if I drove a car that had a smaller carbon footprint. The Yaris was a form of punishment. It felt like I was driving a 25-pound toy car that could fly off the road at any moment. I went from a car I felt great into a car I felt I deserved. Ten days later, I returned the Yaris. I was better than that thing. Fuck it. I got a VW Golf. It was like driving a mean teacher.

I got a second CR-V. This one was burgundy, had 60,000 miles and cloth seats. I kept this one, drove it cross-country, took it to the car wash every week, and felt like a soccer mom out running around in the good life with it.

The itch came when I started driving into Cambridge more to watch the Harvard women’s basketball games. The car was so damn big and the parking garages and parking spots in the Cambridge area were built when cars were the size of VW Bugs. I was afraid of scratching my beautiful car and was also embarrassed about taking up the space of a soccer mom when all I had was me and my dog, so I traded it in for a Corolla with 55,000 miles. A car I hate and currently drive. It is blue and looks like the blue car my father drives, a Honda Accord. The Corolla is sensible and has cloth seats. The good news was I made three thousand dollars on the sale of the Honda. The bad news is I decided to do all this post-COVID when many things, including cars, were much more expensive than they’d been before chaos had struck the industrial world. I did not think, in the 30-day window I had, to check for rust on the undercarriage because I had not lived in a place that salted the roads for three decades. I also did not know that when the snow came, I’d want a car with all-wheel drive and deeply treaded tires. I bought new wheels and tires so the car looked less like a dad car and more like a desperate attempt at pimp my ride and could back up in snow without spinning out, but as much as I tried to love the car that took me from A to B, I still hated it because every time I walked towards it, it told me, You are not special.

And then one day, for a reason the mechanic was later unable to recreate, the Corolla died on me on a busy street at a red light when I had to go poop. Why I still own that car is beyond me. I’m proving some Stephen Stills thing to myself, (And if you can’t be with the one you love, honey/ love the one you’re with), and I’m not sure I’m on the right path.

I believe the car knows I hate it, and for a moment at the red light, it could not bear the hate and it died. It came to life after it was towed to the repair shop that was not Carmax since they were too fucking busy to work on my car. It stayed at the shop for a week but the mechanics couldn’t get it to die again, no matter how many times they took it for a spin around the neighborhood.

This is what I know: my Corolla is doing the best that it can. A better person would love it. My heart breaks for my car, my poor, unwanted car that does its best.

My life coach Katie Peuvrelle told me once, I think, that a car symbolizes your life. This makes sense to me. I feel my car so deeply. I feel the Corolla’s efforting, feel its miles, feel its not-a-BMWness. I feel the Corolla the way I used to feel a horse through the reins when I would ride. Car and driver, horse and rider, body and consciousness, it’s all about relationship. It feels like a middle-aged woman who is strong but can’t sprint home without peeing a little.

Enough about what I jerk I am about my car. Let’s talk more about car shopping. What I really want is a BMW 328i. I love the way BMWs take corners at a fast speed. It feels like sitting on the back of a cheetah. It’s like BMWs are suctioned to the earth as they speed over it. I love that feeling. If I could be a car, I’d be a BMW, but they are expensive to buy and expensive to maintain. Their parts cost more than Toyota parts. I think all my life I’ve been toggling between believing I’m a sports car that’s so fun to drive it turns people into assholes on the road and believing I’m something sensible and safe that never does any harm and is pretty good with gas.

Adoption taught me how to go to Camp Suck it Up. But it also taught me how to run. I’ve so perfected the art of staying and leaving, I can do them at the same time. The Corolla is me running and staying at the same time. It makes me less excited about being alive. I’m conflicted about attaching so much meaning to material possessions, so I’m trying to develop my inner BMW before I go out and buy one. I want to make sure I’m not just buying what I want to be without being it first, but goddamn it’s hard.

I’ve been watching Break Point on Netflix to show my body what an inner BMW looks like. It looks like world-class tennis players who work and work and work to bring out the best of themselves and win. It’s so exciting to watch a person excel. It’s even more exciting to be that person. I want to be that person. I want to be a BMW. I don’t want to be passed easily and look like something a 94-year-old man might drive to CVS to pick up another box of Depends.

Brittany Spears knows having a fast car isn’t something you get on a silver platter: You want a Maserati, you better work, bitch. I don’t want a Maserati because they aren’t my jam, but the Harvard coach I’m co-writing (It takes three people to write a book about a person this amazing!) a book with about her life drives one. It makes a lot of noise when she starts it. Owning that car to me seems like dating a model. If you lose the key fob it’s something like $1500 to replace it. The key to the Corolla isn’t even a fob. It’s a key.

I want to wrap this up, but I’m conflicted. I also want a Ford Connect like I had at Spirit Hill Farm because I can park, go in the back and take a nap or poop in a portable toilet, and no one knows because there are {creepily enough} no back windows. After all I said, I feel bad for my Corolla and may keep it until it dies because I don’t want it to feel abandoned. The answer may be to have two cars and one van. The other answer is to calm the fuck down, keep the Corolla, and focus on finishing my books.