The Car was Empty

I glanced around as the ceiling fan hummed a gentle breeze on my face. The car was on empty. “That seemed right,” I thought, for nothing had really changed since I had laid down, protesting reality. Why protest reality? Because what had reality ever given me?

It was evening, and laying in that grubby student apartment, not two minutes from main campus, the realization that there was barely over nine dollars in my bank account was firmly settling in. Gas prices were on the rise. Between the chicken and rice that was almost my exclusive sustenance, there would be only enough for just under one gallon of gas.

Begrudgingly pulling myself from the mattress that I had been dozing on for the past three hours and embarked on a quest to find a clean pair of socks. While many would not think twice about putting on socks, the mission was no small feat. The piles of shirts and pants, desperately crying out to be laundered, contained in them an assortment of footwear that ranged from dirty-but-wearable to horrifically grotesque.

Pushing aside a pair of pants that rested on that never-used desk I was brought into the present by a sharp thud. Laying on the ground, still tied shut in a leather band, was that small black notebook that my grandmother had given to me for Christmas.

Nana was a poet and an artist, always reciting verses from memory and ranting about this younger generation's inability to understand true beauty. Letting out a short huff I picked the small journal up absentmindedly. In any case, it was easy for her to experience beauty when she never has to ponder the eternal questions of “how will I pay for gas?” or “what will I eat?” She had gifted the notebook so that I could write, or journal, or do anything that would build myself up from that lethargic nicotine addict in a dilapidated room.

In one graceful movement, I flung the unused journal across to the bookcase by the wall, opposite the bed, as if to forever shelf her complaints about modern society with it. As it soared through the musty air something slid from the unopened pages, and at that moment, with time frozen, the cold cruel face of Andrew Jackson stared deep into my soul as a crisp twenty fell from its former home in the binding.

Excitement. Shame. Utter bliss.

A series of emotions piled on me with a weight that dwarfed the mountain of dirty sweaters which the bill had come to rest on. How could I have thought of my grandmother with such disdain? That woman had loved me, cared for me, bestowed countless gifts every holiday through the charity of her own heart. She stood as a giant to those around her, possessing in her mind true culture and virtue. Pioneering a way forward for all women to follow through the activism of her youth.

The stories came flooding back of her marching arm and arm for civil rights, raising signs and voices with her friends and allies against the aimless war in Vietnam, and countless abuses of a neo-liberal state.

Her heart was known by God and her philanthropy, signified by those cool eyes of old hickory, was known by me. Stumbling over the seeming endless typhoon of crumpled underwear and stained shirts I seized the journal to inspect its pages for any further surprises.

Opening the darkened leather cover, for the first time since receiving it, I could scarcely breathe.

Where I had assumed there would have been pages, was instead a hidden compartment concealing a treasure, never thought imaginable.

A hundred. Five hundred. A thousand. Ten thousand. Twenty thousand dollars; neatly bound will love and care!

The overwhelming urge to faint overcame me, as my limbs began to turn to led.

Never again would I be relegated to the inability to afford to eat out. Never again would I grovel in my parents for a loan or be required to subsist of bland poultry.

Every stress and worry quickly faded away and as if God had pressed fast forward on the remote control of my life, the very world changed before my eyes.

My old Honda civic was traded in and I sped along the freeway, in a mustang on route to my modern villa overlooking the Californian beach. Bikinis, mimosas, and endless nights now dominated my existence. A face, once only seen through a drub mirror in a less than hygienic bathroom, was now plastered on the cover of People magazine.

Nana may not have given me culture, art, or that appreciation for beauty that she so often raved about, but she had given me a heavenly bliss that consumed every aspect of being. The only thing in life that gave me even the slightest discomfort was the beeping of my alarm and the realization that I would need to arise for the comfort of my king-size bed.

I had kept that alarm since my days as a destitute student and the impression of that beeping was so jarring, I could hear it even now as the wind from my open convertible, swept through my hair that sunny morning. You would think that with my newfound wealth and fortune I could buy a new one, or at very least change its setting.

Cracking my eyes open I hit the snooze button to, even only temporarily, prevent it from shattering my joy.

But it was not a sunny morning, it was evening.

I glanced around as the ceiling fan hummed a a gentle breeze on my face. The car was on empty. “That seemed right,” I thought, for nothing had really changed since I had laid down, protesting reality. Why protest reality? Because what had reality ever given me?