It’s a friendly-looking car. The headlights, pleasantly round and just a bit fogged with age, are situated just right on its sloping metal cheekbones. I would know it from any angle, in any parking lot, with just the slightest of glimpses. It’s all gentle curves and nonchalance. It used to be my mom’s. It has a rather ugly War of 1812 bicentennial license plate. And as of this Monday, after I called AAA to jump it three times in the span of 24 hours, it’s got a brand-new battery with a three-year warranty.

The car is home to an array of biographical artifacts. A plain black apron I stole from my old cafe job in high school. A bundle of cedar I once drove up to the mountains to burn, when the general vibe of my life had grown so rancid as to render me desperate. A poorly folded, strangely horselike origami crane I made in a therapy session. Dangling from the rear-view mirror is an air freshener my mom sent me, with an old picture of the two of us on either side. It’s a silly, casual selfie; neither of us are even smiling, opting instead to stare the camera down with mock-intensity. The mirror also sports a simple black necklace cord, from which hangs a handmade, rainbow-scarfed llama figurine I found in a parking lot, and a heart-shaped crystal whose twin belongs to my friend Kelis. They swing in place when I make sharp turns, as if to hold me accountable. And tucked into the driver’s side sun visor is a medical ID bracelet from one of my iron infusions, lest I forget the pin-prick feeling of the needle in my arm.

There are smaller traces, too– a smudge of red nail polish against the sunroof release switch, the little cracks on the windshield I’ve yet to get fixed. The way the off-white leather of the driver’s seat visibly sags on the left side; worn in, and worn out, from a decade and a half of use. On the outside shell, there’s the yellowish tinge of horribly expired touch-up paint that only made the scratches look worse. Most telling of all is the large orange stain on the backseat carpet, from a bottle of Gatorade my friend spilled as my mom drove us to lacrosse practice. It’s been fifteen years and the stain has never come out– but from it, the car has earned its long-enduring nickname: the Gator.

I had my first kiss in the driver’s seat of this car, beneath an ordinary summer sky, parked in the boat ramp lot at Centennial Lake. I couldn’t stop laughing when he leaned in to close the gap between us. Naturally, he assumed I was laughing at him, but it was really that I was nervous, and in my nervousness everything about the situation was completely laughable. When we broke up a few months later, he wordlessly flipped my Claddagh ring around from the passenger seat, perhaps a little vindictively. I drove home alone, ‘Sparks’ by Coldplay on repeat (of course), crying so hard that my face felt like it was buzzing.

Years later, when I picked a short-lived love interest up from the train station, I blasted ‘What Does the Fox Say’ from my car’s speakers just to see how he’d react. He responded with general embarrassment (“Please turn it down, oh my god, the windows are open—“) and much less whimsy than was promised; he did not like being on such display for my college town. Due to these irreconcilable differences, the relationship was, indeed, rather short-lived.

Once, when I was driving down Route 40 at age seventeen, my newly-replaced serpentine belt suddenly failed. It turned out to be a faulty part, thrillingly enough, though that didn’t stop the slippery mechanics from trying to charge us for their own mistake. At first the AC stopped working, which I didn’t think too much of, aside from resigned and overheated annoyance. After a minute, though, the gas pedal gave out on me, leaving me coasting down the highway in a slow, freaky deceleration. The real panic set in a few seconds later, when the steering wheel locked up—staunchly resisting my efforts to pull off the road, or indeed, to steer at all. It took all of my strength to yank the wheel over to the left and guide my car to the nearest stretch of shoulder, from which I called my mom, crashing from adrenaline and sweating profusely in hundred-degree heat. Apparently, what I said was: “Mom, the Gator is not thriving.” It makes me think of the time the play-set rope swing broke off from its post while I was in midair, when I was seven or eight; I marched up to the back door, detached rope swing in both hands, and solemnly announced, “Mom, I have bad news.”

They say the body keeps the score. I imagine it’s the same for my car: it holds the residue of every fender-bender beneath its shell, somewhere, so deep within that the auto shop couldn’t ever hope to reach it. The thought of selling the Gator someday makes me queasy. I don’t like the idea of someone else driving it and not knowing exactly where the hood caved in when I rear-ended a Lexus at a stoplight, or how the passenger-side tires looked when I tore them open on a curb. The Lexus driver was extremely gracious, by the way. Her name was Laurie, and I was running late to high school, and I told insurance it was my fault because it was. I sobbed in the parking lot and called my mom, and I pulled myself together in time for second period. I still have Laurie’s number in my phone, and Siri has almost accidentally called her at least a dozen times.

I wonder if our little crash ever crosses her mind, when she passes through that stoplight. It does for me, sometimes—though these days when I’m home, I drive a different car. The Gator lives in California with me now, at school, never to return to its former home on the East Coast. I feel a little pang of regret when I leave it in the Scripps parking garage for the summers. I know the battery will be dead by the time I return. And the fact of the matter is that no car will ever feel as right as the Gator does when I’m behind the wheel. Today, I give her a loving pat, and I shake the little CD-slot hands goodbye. See you in August, my friend.