"HEY, BUDDY, can you spare a kidney?": "Baby, have you got enough gas?"

i never had that quintessential teenage experience.

getting the keys to your own car at 16.

it used to be a bit of a running gag in our home. k. would rovingly reminisce, with lascivious longing, like winding down the back roads to an abandoned cabin for a stealth rendezvous, about his '84 powder blue, ford escort with the singular am stereo inherited from his mother.

no, i never peered through my curtains to a heart-pounding vehicular assault; waxed to a shimmering sheen, blossomed with a stunning, silver bow, perfectly poised with entitlement in my driveway.

"when i was 16, i had kidney failure and my dad was dead!"

cue: rolling of k's eyes. appropriate mugging of h's face.

oh, how we used to howl with laughter.

[weird. no-one's laughing now.]

when i was 16, this leathery lass had ridden the ttc (toronto transit commission) hard; 8 years into jockeyed submission. she was my bitch. her smells and bells so familiar, i strapped on steel-toed boots and kicked away my theatre school debt by mopping up the "bright lights, big city" placentas left dripping overnight on the stairwells by the buy-and-sells; the ne'er do wells.

with trine the tercel, we sizzled, trailblazing across famed route 66. then down a slow burn into infamy i collapsed, crumbling into a chalky glow, burned by the blistering heat within the golden state; myself. i couldn't see the beauteous salve sitting next to me all along.

for the next 15 years, k. and i shared one car, the someone-please-make-them-retro-chic, station wagon. how we ended up driving such a provincial set of wheels is testament to my elastic stubbornness, and maybe finally dumping her, minutely lessens the chances of me ever falling off one.

so there she stood.

fire-engine blazing red.

and there i stood.

squinting through my muddled, post-meditation, pounding haze of pain.

but not the 4 am shot bulleting through my brain; searing me awake. not inhuman sounds shattering dreams of a migraine-free life. and not the ice-cube sink[ing], cold-pool plunge into another dead-woman-walking, nightmare day.

nope.

not even that would kill my engine.

there she revved. and i flushed. with scarlet fever.

and she.

flushed back with canuck-flag waving red.

danish lego-clicking red.

yankee doodle danvian red.

and i was dripping. soaking my back, steamy infatuation; smearing the los angeles asphalt slick.

[slippery when wet.]

and i hopped. and clapped. and clapped some more.

my. very. first. car.

giant forces of goodness, generosity and grace conceived her birth. and i am but a sperm, gratefully, humbly; swimming upstream.

so, of course, her name had to begin with a "g".

yes, i know. nothing with wheels follows a hearse.

[but, she's so pretty!]

i'm not going to lie.

sobriety is a bitch when you're jesused, four on the floor in pain without narcotics.

it's a bitch when you go 11 weeks with only 4 migraines and, wham!, the new drug isn't working.

and it's a bitch when you aren't parking your new car next to your husband's.

but this is the truth about my 10 months and 5 days.

i have a body that was never so free. i have a mind that was never this clear. and a heart that was never so open.

every day in sobriety is a gift.

and all the rest is...

[meet]