The Passenger Seat
I LIVE MY LIFE IN STORIES
My passenger seat currently contains two court files, a makeup bag, several unopened envelopes, one child’s shoe and a cup I have been meaning to throw away long enough that I am no longer comfortable discussing what may be growing inside it.
There is also a sweater I keep carrying everywhere despite living in Louisiana, where the temperature outside is approximately hell and the temperature inside every professional building is set for the preservation of meat. Somewhere beneath all of that is probably a receipt I desperately need and will find exactly one day after it becomes useless.
My vehicle is not really a vehicle anymore. It is an office, dressing room, cafeteria, storage unit and occasional private place to have a nervous breakdown while appearing to look for something in my purse. If I am ever involved in an accident, the first responders will know far too much about my life before they locate me.
The children sit in the back, where they spend most trips reporting one another’s crimes directly to me. This usually involves all three of them speaking at once, no reliable witnesses and at least one accusation that would collapse under even casual cross-examination. Nevertheless, each child expects an immediate ruling from the front seat while I am operating a motor vehicle.
The passenger seat holds everything else.
It holds the things I need for court, the things the children forgot, the things I purchased and need to return and the lunch I packed at seven that morning with the touching belief that I would be permitted to eat it. On particularly ambitious mornings, I place a planner there too. Nothing demonstrates optimism quite like a woman with three children, two full-time jobs and a planner.
For a long time, I thought I filled the passenger seat because I was busy.
Recently, I began to suspect that I filled it because it was empty.
There used to be a person there. Not every day and not on every road, but often enough that the seat belonged to someone. It held conversations, arguments, ordinary silence and the occasional hand reaching across the console. It was occupied by the person I expected would still be sitting there when we were old, although apparently life reserves the right to alter the seating chart without consulting anyone.
Then the person was gone, and the seat became available for administrative use.
There was no formal ceremony. No one lowered a flag. I did not stand in the driveway and announce that the passenger seat had been officially reassigned from husband to miscellaneous property. I simply placed my purse there one morning, added a file that afternoon and continued stacking things until the absence underneath them was no longer visible.
This is one of my more reliable coping mechanisms. If something hurts, I put work on top of it. If it still hurts, I add another project. If the pain remains noticeable, I volunteer for something no sane person with my schedule would agree to do. Eventually, the original feeling is buried beneath enough obligations that locating it would require an archaeological team and a court order.
The system is not healthy, but it is efficient.
For months, that seat became a physical representation of the rest of my life. Every inch was occupied, very little was organized and something important was almost certainly buried underneath a Sonic napkin. Anyone looking through the window would have concluded that there was simply no room for another person.
They would not have been entirely wrong.
One afternoon, I finally cleaned out the car. I would love to say this happened because I experienced a breakthrough and decided to reclaim my space. In reality, I needed room for something else, and the pile had reached a height that created a legitimate visibility issue.
I carried everything inside one armful at a time. The court files went to the office. The clothes went into the house, where they could join the more established clothing piles. I threw away several cups and enough receipts to reconstruct my movements throughout northern Louisiana. I found a lipstick I had already replaced, paperwork I had accused someone else of losing and a French fry that appeared old enough to vote.
Eventually, I opened the passenger door and found a seat underneath it all.
It looked enormous.
That irritated me.
I had spent months functioning quite well without acknowledging what the pile was covering, and now there it was: an entire empty seat making a point nobody had asked it to make. Nothing in adulthood is allowed to remain an ordinary household chore. Apparently, even cleaning out a car must become an opportunity for emotional discovery.
There are losses that arrive loudly enough to divide your life into before and after. Then there are the smaller absences that wait for you in ordinary places. They appear on forms when you reach the line marked “spouse.” They show up in family photographs, holiday plans and grocery-store aisles. They sit beside you at red lights, saying absolutely nothing and somehow managing to be obnoxious about it.
For a while, I believed the empty passenger seat meant my life was missing something.
That is the story absence tells when it first arrives. It tells you that the life you expected was the real one and whatever remains is merely the damaged version. It convinces you that an empty space is evidence of failure and that your job is to fill it as quickly as possible, preferably before anyone else notices.
People are especially eager to help single women with this. The minute a marriage ends, the world begins acting as though a replacement must be ordered before the warranty expires. Men emerge from Facebook like an infestation. Friends begin mentioning somebody’s divorced cousin. People assure you that you will “find someone,” as though you misplaced a man near the frozen vegetables and simply need help checking the next aisle.
I am not presently taking applications for the passenger seat.
For one thing, there are files in it.
For another, I am beginning to understand that having someone sitting beside you does not necessarily mean you are not alone. Sometimes the loneliest drives are the ones taken with another person in the car. Sometimes someone occupies the seat for years without ever noticing how exhausted the driver has become.
An occupied seat is not proof of companionship. A wedding ring is not proof of partnership. And having someone beside you does not mean he is helping you get anywhere worth going.
That may be the most uncomfortable part of losing the future I thought I had. I am not only grieving the person who is no longer sitting there. I am grieving the woman who believed his presence meant she was safe, chosen and traveling toward the life they had promised one another.
I occasionally miss her almost as much as I miss him.
She had no idea what was coming. I want to warn her, shake her and possibly slap her a little, although that seems unfair since she was already doing the best she could with information that turned out to be aggressively incomplete. She trusted the route because she trusted the person beside her.
Now there is no one beside me, and for the first time in a long time, no one else is pretending to know where I should go.
The silence is not always peaceful. Sometimes it is just silence, and people who describe solitude as endlessly empowering have clearly never cried at a red light while holding cold French fries. There are nights when the empty seat feels like rejection made out of upholstery. There are mornings when I would gladly trade all this personal growth for the life I ordered in the first place.
But there are also days when the seat feels different.
I choose the music. I take the long way home because the sky over the lake is beautiful. I change directions without explaining myself. I deliver entire closing arguments to people who are not present and win every single one of them. I say the things I was too polite to say at the time, occasionally with hand gestures that concern the drivers around me.
No one reaches for the wheel. No one criticizes the route. No one sits beside me while making me feel that I am somehow traveling alone.
The passenger seat may be empty, but the driver’s seat is occupied.
That is not the consolation prize I once thought it was.
I will probably cover the seat again tomorrow. There will be another file, another abandoned cup and another object one of my children hands me as though I am both their mother and a county landfill. My car will remain a public health concern with leather seats, and I will continue insisting that I know exactly where everything is.
But I know what is beneath the pile now.
There is space.
Maybe someone will sit there again one day. If he does, he will need to understand that the seat beside me is not the same thing as the authority to direct me. He will not be there to save me, complete me or explain where I went wrong at the last intersection. He will be there because his company makes the drive better—and because I decided he was worth moving the court files.
Until then, the seat can remain empty.
I have discovered that empty and missing are not the same thing.
Besides, I am driving. Whoever comes next can buckle up, move the French fries and enjoy the scenery.
Judith L. Hampton
Attorney-at-Law
Hampton Law Firm
Comments