I am at the front of a busy intersection. The light is red and I'm alone in my father's 1966 aquamarine Ford pickup, the very one I had learned how to drive in many years before. This pickup has no buttons or dials, only pull-out, twisting knobs which control things I have never fully understood: "Choke." "Temp." "Idle." A 4-gear manual stickshift juts off the steering column, sweetly offset by a clamp-on driver's wheel ornament whose glass has clouded and cracked over time. Inside is a buxom blonde hootchie girl in a tight sweater. Tucked in the sun visor above the windshield, forever held in place by old rubber bands, are curled school pictures of me and my sister taken decades ago. We are not these children anymore.
The light turns green. There are 20, 30 cars behind me. I slowly release the clutch and press the gas pedal to move forward. But the engine isn't on. The truck is at a dead stop. There are no keys in the ignition. No keys.
Cars behind me begin to honk and rev. I immediately lurch into a state of high panic - this is a crisis! I'm at the front of the intersection, blocking everything behind me! They are all honking and yelling!, but they don't understand why it is I'm not moving: Hey!! I can't fucking start the truck! Not by pushing or pulling or gunning anything within reach. There are no keys! No engine starts without the keys.
My only thought is to put the truck in neutral and get out and somehow push it forward. With no driver, with no one steering, praying I have enough strength to push it...somewhere.
I don't want to be here.
Depression is an insidious malfunction. You don't have enough fuel nor the available driving skill to left-blinker your way onto the emergency lane. So you stay stuck, checking and rechecking all the meters and controls which tell you the condition of your machine, but that doesn't get you one inch forward. You hide from other drivers, you hide from yourself. You hear the honks, angry and chiding, of the people you love the most - those people you have tried all your life to shield from the worst of what goes on in your head - they're all shouting at you in disgust: "Get over it!" "Man up!" "Move on!" And who can blame them? What else can they realistically do? They're stuck behind you, they love you, have worried about you, championed you while frustrated by you. But they need to see you finally move on -- soon -- so they can take a nice long sigh of relief and then get on to where they are heading.
Honks and harangues so that they know you have heard them. But it doesn't quite work like that really. You can't honk or argue away a fog that rolls in on a cold damp morning. Fire and brimstone, for all their furious spectacle, oddly create no sparks. They actually suceed better at dumping more dirt on the embers.
You try, and they try. Hard. But none of us can will the engine to start. We need the keys.
Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Tomorrow never knows. I will never be hungry again. When one door closes, another opens.
I can see those doors sometimes, the new ones, and I so want to step through them. But the doorknobs don't turn. They hit a quick hard stop when I try them. They're locked. From the inside.
Where, where, oh where! did I put those fucking keys??
Woody Firm, April 11, 2008