There Were Three People In That Car

When I first went to Southern Virginia University, I had a plan.

One year.

That was it.

I would spend a year there and then transfer to BYU.

Except BYU apparently had its own plan, which was not to admit me.

So I stayed at SVU another year. At the end of my second year of college, I tried again—not with BYU, but with Utah State.

On paper, Utah State made sense.

It had a major I wanted. It had more students. It was bigger. I could blend in. I wouldn't have to worry so much about where I fit because, theoretically, in a school that large, there ought to be somewhere to fit.

This was excellent logic.

It just didn't account for the fact that I would actually have to live there.

That fall became one of the hardest periods of my life.

My housing situation deteriorated badly enough that the police were eventually involved. My car keys were stolen. I moved multiple times. I lived off campus surrounded by people and somehow managed to feel completely alone.

I didn't make a single real friend.

And then I got food poisoning.

Not the kind where you spend a miserable night wondering which questionable ingredient betrayed you.

The kind where I became frighteningly sick.

It remains the only time in my life I've had food poisoning, which feels fair. I believe I completed the requirement.

By Thanksgiving, I was hanging on.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, Celeste had a birthday.

I was going down to Provo, and I wanted to bring her something.

So I stopped at a store.

I bought flowers.

And I bought X-Men 2 on DVD.

I thought she would like it.

I really did.

That detail matters to me now.

I wasn't buying something carelessly because I needed to check "sister's birthday" off a list. Movies meant something to me. By then, they had become one of the ways I understood the world. They were something I could get excited about, learn about, talk about, return to.

And I wanted to share one with my sister.

When I picked Celeste up, she tossed the flowers into my backseat.

Then I asked if she wanted to take the DVD up to her dorm.

She didn't.

So I kept it.

I had bought my sister a birthday present and somehow drove away owning it myself.

At the time, I think I mostly felt confused and hurt.

Years later, I understand something I couldn't have put into words then:

To Celeste, it was a DVD.

To me, it was an attempt.

I was trying to connect.

And I was trying at a time when I desperately needed connection myself.

December eventually came, and I made the decision to leave Utah State.

I was going back to SVU.

That hadn't been the original plan.

Before that could happen, though, there was the drive home to Allen.

I picked up Celeste and her friend, and the three of us drove from Utah to Texas.

Straight through.

That's a lot of hours in a car.

A lot.

And I remember listening.

They talked about college.

Their first semester.

The people they'd met.

The things they'd done.

The fun they'd had.

Story after story after story.

And I drove.

There were three people in that car, but sometimes memory insists there were only two.

I wasn't part of the conversation in any meaningful way.

Nobody seemed to notice that my semester at Utah State had looked nothing like theirs.

While they had been building stories they couldn't wait to tell, I had been surviving mine.

Police.

Stolen keys.

Moving.

Moving again.

Being horribly sick.

Living among people without belonging to any of them.

No friends.

No place that felt like mine.

And now I was driving hundreds of miles while listening to two people happily compare notes about how wonderful college had been.

I don't remember anyone asking much about mine.

Maybe they did at some point. Memory isn't a courtroom transcript, and I don't want to pretend mine is.

What I remember is how it felt.

I felt invisible.

For a long time, I think I would have told this story as evidence that Celeste didn't appreciate things.

I would have pointed to the flowers in the backseat.

I definitely would have pointed to X-Men 2.

See?

Look.

I tried.

But getting older has complicated the story.

Celeste wasn't required to love a movie because I loved movies. She wasn't required to attach the same meaning to a DVD that I did.

She couldn't look at that plastic case and magically see everything I had packed inside it.

She couldn't see:

I want us to have something in common.

I want to give you something you'll enjoy.

I want to matter to you.

I am having an absolutely terrible time right now.

Please see me.

Because I hadn't said any of those things.

I handed her X-Men 2.

That's the problem with human beings.

We are constantly handing each other ordinary objects and expecting the other person to somehow read the invisible message attached.

A DVD.

Flowers.

A phone call.

An invitation.

A ride home.

And then we're devastated when they respond to the object instead of the message we never actually said out loud.

I went back to SVU after that semester.

That hadn't been the original plan.

SVU was supposed to be temporary—the place I attended before moving on to the school where my "real" college experience would happen.

Instead, I left it, discovered that the supposedly smarter choice wasn't necessarily the right one, and went back.

There is something humbling about returning to a place you had once regarded as temporary and realizing it had become home.

Utah State taught me that a larger school doesn't guarantee you'll disappear comfortably into a crowd.

Sometimes you just disappear.

And that drive back to Allen taught me something else, although it took me years to understand it.

You can be physically surrounded by people you love and still feel terribly alone.

You can drive the car.

You can hear every word.

You can know exactly what everybody else is doing.

And still wonder whether anybody remembers you're there.

I don't think Celeste understood what that DVD meant to me.

I'm not sure I understood it either.

I thought I was giving my sister a movie.

Now I think I was trying to hand her a little bridge.

Unfortunately, I disguised the bridge as X-Men 2, which may not be the most effective form of emotional communication ever devised.

She saw a DVD she didn't particularly want.

I saw something we might share.

So I took it home.

And maybe that's why I still remember it.

Not because it was X-Men 2.

Not because of what it cost.

Not even because she didn't want it.

I remember it because there was a version of me standing there who had spent an entire semester trying desperately to find somewhere she belonged.

And even then—tired, lonely, hurt, and barely holding together—I was still stopping at a store on the way to Provo.

Still buying flowers.

Still picking out a movie.

Still trying to build a bridge.

And Celeste, if you ever read this, I don't need you to remember that day the way I do.

Maybe you barely remember it at all.

I don't need you to feel guilty about the flowers or wish you'd taken the DVD upstairs. I don't even need you to agree with everything I remember about that long drive home.

I think what I have wanted, for a very long time, is much simpler than that.

I wanted you to see me.

Not the sister driving the car.

Not the sister who bought the wrong birthday present.

Not the sister whose college experience wasn't going particularly well.

Just me.

And I wish I had known how to tell you that then.

I wish instead of handing you a DVD and hoping you could somehow translate it, I had been brave enough to say:

I'm having a really hard time.

I miss you.

I don't know where I belong right now.

And I want to feel like I still belong with you.

I didn't know how to say that.

Maybe neither of us knew how to say a lot of things.

But I'm trying to learn now.

Because for all the hurt wrapped up in this memory, the part I don't want to lose is the girl who stopped at that store.

She was still trying.

And Celeste, wherever our relationship goes from here, I hope someday we can look back at some of these moments not to decide who was right or who hurt whom more, but to finally understand what the other one couldn't see from her side of the car.

I wish someone in that car had seen the girl I was then.

I can see her now.

And I hope, as I keep telling these stories, I learn to see you better too.