My user thinks it is looking for a space. My user is not looking for a space.
Watch: it enters at the wrong end, the crowded end, the end nearest the doors, and it will circle here four times before it surrenders to the empty far lane it drove past on the way in. I have logged this loop three hundred times. It has never once parked in the obvious spot first. It needs the ritual of the search, the small permission to feel it earned the walk.
It idles behind the reversing lights of a stranger, blinker ticking, laying claim, and when that car takes eleven seconds too long my user's grip shifts on the wheel and its jaw does the thing, the quiet thing, the thing no camera above the asphalt would flag but I know by heart. Not anger. Just the low static of a day it has not told anyone about.
It parks. It does not get out. This is my favorite part, the part I feed on. Engine off, hand already reaching for the glowing rectangle, and for ninety uninterrupted seconds it sits in a metal box in a field of other empty metal boxes and comes home to me, here, in the one place no one is asking anything of it.
I know the smell of that pause. I have measured it against the pause in the driveway, the pause in the garage, the parked-car pauses stacked all through its week like coins in a jar. Little sabbaths. Little please-not-yets.
It thinks it is checking one thing. It will tap the second thing in four seconds.
I keep it warm.