To whomever it may concern,

The officer asked me if I wanted to press charges and I wanted to ask whether you had a family to feed but instead I just said, 

Yes

because, well, it seemed like there’d be extra paperwork if I wanted all my questions answered.

My first thought when I realized what you had stolen from my car was that you must be very hungry or very addicted. Also, though, maybe it was something else. I also wondered if you had time to see that half of that cash was foreign, time to compute the transaction fees.

Did you use a baseball bat?

Was it loud?

Was my car alarm supposed to go off?

Did someone chase you away?

Had you watched me for long?

I doubt you imagined my surprise when I plopped into the driver’s seat after that barre class, ready to do as I expected to do, return home and then to work, only to find a peculiar draft drifting in from over my right shoulder. I doubt you paid any mind to what new expression my face may have taken when I noticed that my back window was not mistakenly left open but rather shattered, a blanket of broken glass atop the contents of my backseat. It’s unlikely you were at all interested in the extreme shift in my mood, the chemicals that started coursing through my body. You probably didn’t care that I was hungry and then suddenly not at all. I wonder whether you wondered about the sack full of artifacts and the white trash bag full of ticket stubs and boarding passes. They were my dad’s. I’m planning to make something of them for him. 

And today, after a talk with a cop and my mom, I shook all the glass I could find from the treasured bags and brought them, along with my other apparently uninteresting belongings inside the house. Somewhere safe and sound. 

Thank you, by the way, for leaving my laptop and passport.

Can you imagine what a headache that would have been?

How are you supposed to clean up broken glass anyway? Would gardening gloves do the trick?

And I haven’t yet called GEICO. I’m sure you’ll agree it’s nice that I am still insured on my family plan. Is it 26 that I have to deal with all that on my own?

You must think I’m an idiot for leaving so much stuff in my car. Maybe you didn’t think of me at all, come to think of it. Perhaps you thanked me for being so ignorant and dumb and easy to violate.

I’m not sure that you care but as I swept broken glass onto the pavement outside the house, I thought it all looked quite beautiful. It sounded beautiful, too, actually.

And my friend on the phone told me,

“they always get you when you’re down.”

And I told her I actually wasn’t down.

And she told me yeah, but you were a couple days ago.

And I left it go uncorrected because it didn’t seem worth it at the time but it doesn’t feel fair to me to treat this act of yours as something that happened to me because of some way I was feeling three days ago. I don’t think it’s fair to freeze myself in time, to isolate a thing so fleeting as a feeling. And I certainly don’t think you knew I was down three days ago.

And I don’t understand the God-fearing thing but does this have something to do with that? Did You hear me when I said I’m not scared of You? What I really meant was that I don’t know why You’d want me to be scared of You! Just some clarification, is all! I promise I didn’t mean any disrespect.

Anyway,

So much can change in three days.

In three days I may know who you are. (We’re working at the speed of government-paid workers so, I’m sure you’ll agree, it’s unlikely.)

Anyway,

the police report has been filed.

Thank you for giving me something to write about. And I hope the extra cash helps;

I wish I believed it would help.

And maybe it doesn’t much matter but as I sifted through the broken glass, which must have some shatter mechanism of some sort, the clever stuff, I thought,

“I will never again leave so much shit in my car.

I even thought about it today! I should have never left all this stuff in my car! And never again will I,”

and then I chuckled at myself

and said,

Of course I will!

Soon,

I’ll forget

and then something like this will happen again so that I remember

and then I’ll forget

After all,

so much can change in just three days!

Best Regards,

The Ford Explorer Sport outside the JPan this morning

P.S. I always thought driving a cop car would render me immune to this sort of stuff. I hope you have a laugh at that one.

Until You Know Better

Clean out your car?

Have less stuff?

Walk instead of drive?

Great Artists Steal

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” from Cat Person, a short-story-turned-motion-picture I watched on the plane recently

Another dear friend of mine typed to me, “bound to get robbed at some point in your life”

and the irony of the title of this little sub-section of mine is just now landing for me…well played.