We took a familiar route, one that we both liked with plenty of twists and turns and open road so that I could open you up and feel the way you hugged the curves and how it felt one last time to zoom past other drivers.
I patted you on the dash and I cried because I knew it was the last time we'd do this. Anyone reading this would probably think that I am melodramatic and weird to do that. They probably never needed a car the way I did when you came into my life.
They probably would never understand how the first time I saw you, my heart kind of fluttered a little bit, the way it does when you first see a person who strikes you as attractive and, totes hot as the kids say.
I also knew that our time had come. There were signs...lately you'd begun to cough a bit and seemed tired a lot of the time. You decided that idling and running the air conditioner were functions you'd no longer perform simultaneously. Your doctor bills were really adding up. I, not being a car surgeon myself, never really understood what was actually ailing you. It was never that I didn't care, I felt helpless watching you decline. More than anything, I wanted to save you because you'd been just about the best car I'd ever had.
We had so much fun together. So many trips with the top down and the wind in our hair, the radio blaring out 80's classics. You gave me probably the only real youth I'd ever known. You made me the kind of person I'd always wanted to be, a cool chick, the kind that drives a sports car. I never felt any better than the day I was at a Subway looking at you waiting for me outside through the window when a little girl at a nearby table pointed at you and said that she wanted a car just like you when she grew up. You made me enviable and attractive. You made it okay to be childless because you didn't have a backseat anyway.
The soulless bottom-line driven car dealer gave me a pittance for you. I still feel badly about that. Not about the money, it was never about the money. It was because for me, you were, are, and always will be priceless. Somehow you always got me to work, and to the places I needed to go. Always with that ear to ear grin on your Miata grill face. You gave your all and never let me down. Even down to the moment we putt-putted into the car dealership last Saturday.
I remember grieving our last moments together, because your black frame sitting out in the late August Florida afternoon sun was too hot to touch. I couldn't give you one last pat without incurring 3rd degree burns. I cried again as I sat in your furnace-like interior one last time trying to somehow thank you for always being there for me. I shouldn't have done it, but walking away, I turned back for one last look and such a sob rose in my throat that it physically hurt.
Your successor is not a Miata. He's a German-engineered, reliable, correct sort of fellow. Unlike you, he doesn't really make many interesting squeaks and clunks. He does his job efficiently and safely. He doesn't have your zip and panache but he does have an innate sort of dignity and class that I think you would approve of. He's the kind of car that I need these days at my new job.
I'll never forget you little 1997 Mazda Miata or what you represented to me.
I sincerely hope that you end up with a car surgeon type who can give you the sort of detailed care that you need, or failing that, that you end up reborn with your parts in a new Miata so that you can once again run free on curving roads zooming ahead of everyone with that ear splitting grin intact.
Goodbye Miata...and long live the roadster...
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