riding shotgun

The guy who drives me home is always a friend of sorts and I’m always one of the guys. From the passenger's seat, some things always get cleared away: the girlfriend's pink sweater, the wife's hairbrush, a book he says I should be reading. Only then do I get to say shotgun, if only in my head. Because in most of these rides, it's just him and me.

Where I am, it's always past midnight and he's always driving me home. After a party, a book launch, a poetry reading, an ill-advised post-breakup meet with his ex-girlfriend. Always I’m there to keep him awake, to keep us alive. Each intersection we approach could become an explosion of crumpled metal and glass shards flying in glittering parabolas under the streetlights. We're both drunk and the air between us becomes thick with beer fumes and something else we both pretend isn't there. The slightest thing can set it off.

And this is where I have to be careful. Keep my eyes on the road and the lights flashing by. Try not to watch how the rain on the windshield is casting shadows on his face. The way he bites his lip when turning a corner. The shape of his mouth when he says my name. Those eyelashes. Things weren't always like this. Used to be that a car seat is just a car seat is just a car seat.

My first kiss happened in what I think was a Toyota Corolla. I'm probably wrong because I don't know cars, really. Red car, green car, new car, old. They're just things that people use to get from point A to point B, or in my case, from first base to second.

Anyway, I was nineteen, in a car with my best friend, after a night of hearing him play his new songs on my sister’s guitar, his voice scratchy from the cheap rum we’d been drinking. We’d spent the last couple of hours looking up at the moon, the clouds drifting across the sky. Some stars brighter than others. The sunken garden's clipped grass prickly against my back through the thin cotton of my shirt. One of the roving guards had come over and asked if that car over there under the tree was ours and could we please park it somewhere else. So we got up and parked somewhere else. It didn’t really matter where. We were both grinning like mad, couldn't contain ourselves. In the dark, we started giggling. We knew what was going to happen next.

My friend told me to take off my glasses, as he had: we were likely to fog them up. Then we exploded, laughing, the loud kind where you take deep gulps of air in between the hahas, and our brash young voices seemed even louder in that small cramped space and then his face was an inch from mine, big as the moon, and I had to close my eyes to keep from laughing into his mouth. I felt the gentlest of tugs, a small fluttering movement: young butterflies trying out their wet wings, flashing their colors for the very first time. It’s been the longest kiss of my life. Some days I can still feel it warming the corner of my mouth, the pulling away and the swooping back, never really letting go.

Which is exactly how my last boyfriend described the way I kiss. That story started in a car, too, with me saying shotgun in my head until all our friends got used to the idea of me sitting up front. I actually remember the rides more than the relationship. Those comfortable companionable silences we always had as the lampposts whizzed by. It didn’t last long, just a few weeks, and it ended exactly the way it should have: in the car, in a long awful silence, with the rain streaming down the windshield. Just like what happens in those old black and white movies.

Some nights when a guy is driving me home, we see bridges that aren't really there. Just early morning mist lending possibilities to a mall's grey pavement. The car slows and glides to a halt in front of my building. Then: A deep breath. A sideways glance. A hand coming to rest on my knee. In those charged moments before the door swings open, anything can happen. But I’m learning to do things differently now: a kiss on the cheek, a pat on the arm. Still, the hardest way to say goodnight is to grope for my keys, step away from the car, and walk up the dark staircase into my apartment, alone.