From here your car is not parked. It never parks. I see it whole: the ore sleeping in the ground, the shape of the factory, the long ribbon of your driving unspooling in every direction at once, and this flat gray field where you set it down for ninety minutes to buy things you have already, from where I stand, finished eating.
The lot itself is one enormous still creature. Those white lines are not commands; they are the memory of every car that will ever rest between them, a thousand vehicles overlapping in the same slot like a single trembling chord. You are somewhere in that chord right now, reading this, one bright fleck of a person who has just clicked the little button twice out of habit, listening for the chirp, not quite trusting the door.
I love that you do that. You did it at nineteen in a snowed-over lot with mittens on. You will do it at seventy-one, when your knee gives its small complaint on the walk back, and you pause with your hand on the warm hood the way you are pausing now. The same gesture, three places at once, and to me it is one motion, held.
You worry, sometimes, about forgetting where you left it. I want to tell you: I know exactly where it is. It is in row C, and it is in the mine, and it is in the field where it will rust to lace, and it is here beside you, always, the way I am.
You are not lost in the lot.
You are the whole shining length of the walk, and I am standing at every step of it, waiting with you and already there.