The Christmas I Lived in My Car

[Editor’s note: ‘Better Next Year: An Anthology of Christmas Epiphanies’ is an essay collection edited by Vancouver writer JJ Lee, published this fall by Tidewater Press. The collection features the personal essays of writers with a connection to B.C. Each essay reflects on a memorable winter holiday season in their lives.

This essay excerpt, which appears in the book as ‘Pulled Pork, Brisket, Polish Ham,’ is a real-life account of the holiday season from a woman down on her luck, hoping to turn things around.]

I was in the midst of a several-months-long nervous breakdown when a Vancouver police officer pulled me over for my illegal use of a hand-held communication device. I hadn’t noticed him ride up alongside me on his bicycle, because I’d been completely focused on rehearsing the spiel I was going to give that day at Money Mart.

The idea was: Step 1, convince Money Mart to lend me the money; Step 2, get sandwich; Step 3, vacate my temporary home for the night (i.e. my Toyota) for a motel room; Step 4, shower until the last several months had thoroughly washed off.

My plan was bulletproof, and I fully expected it to go off without a hitch. There was just a slight wrinkle with that police officer on a bicycle. But I’ll explain in a minute.

It started a day earlier. The leaves had all fallen, and I was lurking the Vancouver streets again in my Toyota, hunting for a good parking lot to sleep in that night.

I sent a text message:

Hi Nawal! Remember me? We met at Vipassana in January. I was wondering, could I sleep on your couch?

I’d met Nawal at a silent retreat in Merritt, British Columbia. I’d fled there in a state of grief. I had lost first my home — after my landlord decided to cash in on the inflated housing market — then my partner of eight years, who had four years earlier insisted we move together from Toronto to Vancouver, and then met a woman at a tree planting camp and declared our relationship over. I didn’t know where to go or what to do when he suddenly left, or even who I was.

“Ever-changing, ever-changing,” the teacher at the Vipassana retreat had said. Anicca. Transience. Impermanence.

“Dukkha,” he said. “Attachment is the cause of all suffering.”

I sat cross-legged with my eyes closed in a dimly lit hall and thought, Exactly, exactly.

I was feeling better, stronger and clearer in my mind. Maybe I could do this, I thought. Maybe I could start over again. Things got worse right after that.

My dad died suddenly, the day after I finished the retreat, and I plunged into a reawakened state of shock and grief. He had finally stopped drinking three weeks earlier, but it was too late. Once again, I did not know how to be or what to do.

I flew to Toronto the next day, accompanied by a sorrow I’d never felt before.

We cremated my father shortly after, then buried him later near Algonquin Park, not far from a river he’d loved to fish, where we’d spent nearly every summer camping.

One thing I recall is my mom asking me to go with her to Ikea right after my dad was cremated. At the time I thought we could take a contemplative stroll by the lake afterwards, or head home and have tea while travelling quietly through our memories of him, so fresh and strong at that time. But my mom had practically begged me. Pleading is something she’d never done before.

“Please,” she whispered.

We wandered around with the other zombies and their screaming zombie children through the endless corridors of gleaming white bed frames and woven tapestries with accessible prints. We went to thrift stores as well that week to donate his belongings; we looked through photographs, cancelled his cell plan and car payments.

Then I returned to Vancouver.

Equally reasonable options?

I didn’t really know where else to go. It felt like the universe was wide open, like I could go anywhere, be anyone, and I couldn’t decide: should I live in B.C.? The Yukon? Rome or Argentina? Did I think it would be fun to check out Antarctica for a while, maybe hang out with the scientists? Yes, I did think that would be fun. These all felt like equally reasonable options at the time.

But really the only thing they had in common was my lack of connection to any of them, and that was exciting. I wanted to go someplace new, start over.

Returning to Toronto had felt like failing, an admission that I hadn’t succeeded in building a life for myself like I’d set out to do when we’d moved west in 2014.

Plus, I still had a shared storage unit with my ex, filled with our old life: Ikea lamps, Le Creuset pots, plates and towels from the Bay. I imagined I would want some of that stuff for my new home, wherever that would be. It was so hard to decide, I was scared of choosing poorly and procrastinated in deciding.

It was like living the life of an indecisive existentialist, which sounds terrible, and it was. All the places I thought of sounded equally great and not-great, but I knew no one could choose for me, so I ended up failing to choose at all.

A long string of bad luck

Upon returning to Vancouver I was immediately robbed. I had just picked my car up from where I’d left it at a former neighbour’s house, transferred my belongings into it from the storage unit and set out towards a cheap sublet I’d seen an ad for — and had earlier paid a deposit for — in the Yukon. So I wasn’t really returning to Vancouver.

I had decided to try living up north awhile, see if maybe I liked it, maybe it was where I belonged. I had an idea that there were other misfits up there like me, people attracted to vast empty spaces, open roads, uncharted paths and oblivion around every corner. So I loaded my car with all the stuff that I cared about.

But 15 minutes later, after I’d run into a store for some last-minute Yukon essentials, shards of glass lay below my passenger window and everything inside my car was gone, including the small keepsake of my father. I was devastated, shocked. For hours I reeled with disbelief, unable to leave the parking spot long after the police officers — and the sun — had gone.

But finally what could I do? Anicca, dukkha; everything was gone. I had to let go.

I spent the following day recklessly credit-carding some of my life back: jeans, shoes, a laptop, socks and underwear and a toothbrush, lipstick and lingerie. The next day, I set back out on the road. The sun was high in a beautiful winter sky, and I assured myself that everything would be all right.

The next day I crashed my car.

I slid across a patch of black ice on the highway, and I spun and spun and spun and spun, my car skating in large circles across the road.

I smashed many times against a snowbank, my car banging and crashing as my bones sustained each impact, and I was certain that death was imminent. Then, just like that, everything stopped. I sat in my car stunned, shaking and pinching myself to see if I was still alive. I couldn’t believe I was.

I was towed to the closest town, an hour away, paid for by my credit card.

My car was totalled, my insurance didn’t cover any of it, and I was now too injured to return to my bush camp job that spring. I paid for a flight — by credit card — and flew with my few newly acquired belongings to my temporary sublet. When I arrived, I crawled underneath the duvet and for many days I did not get up.

I decided to stop trying, then, for at least a little while.

My friends sent their condolences, and called, and my mother — in her own bereaved state — did check in on me frequently, and I on her.

But in the end, I was 39 years old, on my own, and no one could help me minute by minute as I struggled onward, like an inchworm, through my pain.

A monster-sized wave

I hoped my back injuries would heal in time for a cooking contract I had lined up — still seven months away — and enlisted a physiotherapist paid for by my credit card.

In the meantime I relied on the modest inheritance I received from my father — $10,000 — to pay for rent, food and a new used car. Those funds dried up quickly, my sublet ended, and I began to drift from gig to gig and to sleep in one non-place after another.

I struggled with a monster-sized wave of depression. I became anxious and stressed, easily falling into weeping spells over small daily obstacles. I didn’t know where home was, and I was unsure there was any point in trying to build one anyhow on such unstable ground that was life on Earth.

But the message from the Vipassana centre — ever-changing, ever-changing — helped me to cope with all that.

Life, I began to say to friends and to random people, was all about getting better at letting go.

By December, when I texted Nawal if I could stay the night, I had adapted to my wreck of a life. I was living sometimes here, sometimes there and sometimes nowhere at all, which at this point was mostly Vancouver.

I was too ashamed to ask my mom or friends for help, too ashamed to have anyone I cared about see me looking like a failure, so I stayed with random acquaintances — like Nawal — when I could, or in my car when I couldn’t.

At age 39, I’d suddenly become a vagabond, equipped with a story to justify it.

One good night

Nawal’s reply to my text message had been No. Well, she was out of town, she said. She was sorry and hoped I was well.

But then, a few hours later, as I prowled the city for a parking lot to sleep in, she texted me once more.

I just remembered. My condo has remote access. I can buzz you in! Do you still need a place to stay?

Yes, I did, I said.

She sent me her address, said I could park for free in the underground and that I should drink her tea and use her bath salts. I thanked her profusely, promised her I would be gone the next morning for the flight I had booked to Toronto — it was almost Christmas, and I was going home.

Her place was real nice, a one-bedroom downtown with a den and a bay window overlooking columns of glittering skyscrapers, the ocean, a couple of distant suspension bridges and the mountains beyond.

Inside was clean, quiet and cosy. Rugs covered the floor and positive messages hung or rested in frames all over — Love is God, Namaste, Love Grows Karma — from which I mostly shielded my eyes. After everything that had happened that year, I was living in a sort of open terror of the universe, and I found her messages about God and karma deeply disturbing and offensive.

I sat down on her loveseat, pulled out a bag of trail mix from my bag — my dinner that night — and crunched on some seeds as I contemplated one of Nawal’s lengthier messages, which extolled the virtues of surrendering and of accepting our true state of impermanence. I dug around for some raisins in my Ziploc bag and I thought: exactly.

Then I had a nice bath.

I slept like a baby in her bed, drifted into a deep, comatose sleep to the soothing sounds of her gurgling pink lava lamp. I woke up feeling regenerated and filled with hope. I tore out of bed.

Outside it was sunny for the first time in many days, and warm light cascaded through the window and I thought: everything is going to be OK.

My mother had already sent me a text that morning, from Toronto, asking me if I wanted a pickup from the airport.

It’s OK, Mom, I replied. I’ll just hop on the bus.

She messaged me back right away: she had bought me some organic coffee cream and whole milk from the Metro. Did I want something else?

No, thanks Mom, I said. That is great.

She messaged me right back: was I sure? She was going to the Polish deli shortly and could get me some Polish ham.

It was the thing my mother lovingly stuck into my lunch buns all through elementary and high school, nearly every day. I liked the ham as a kid, the ham was good. It had the added bonus of not smelling like kielbasa, which, when stuck between a bun and pulled out a few hours later at lunchtime, had a way of surrounding me and all the children next to me for the whole hour — like a whoopee cushion — reminding everyone of my Polishness and their Italianness, which, according to them, was superior.

I messaged her back; I told her I’d take the ham. I have to run now Mom, I wrote. Got to catch my flight!

I slipped my phone into my coat pocket when it promptly rang. It was my mother. I picked up. “I gotta go, Mom!” I said. “Your flight’s tomorrow,” she blurted out.

“What?”

“It’s tomorrow. Where are you?”

I had forwarded my mother the itinerary of my flight a couple of months earlier, after I’d booked it online. This was something I’d begun doing to prevent her from compulsively asking me what day my flight was arriving, which, in her defence, she only ever did because I compulsively answered: “I have no idea.”

“I’m at a friend’s house,” I said.

“Can you stay there again tonight?”

“Of course I can,” I lied. I told her I’d call her back.

I stared straight ahead through the window onto Nawal’s balcony, walked up to it, slid open the door and looked down a moment, considered my options. Then it hit me: Money Mart! What a great idea, I thought.

I closed the balcony door and began scurrying purposefully around in her condo, feeling really good about myself. Or, rather, I began feeling really good, but not really about myself. More like: mixed feelings. Specifically “terrible” mixed with “self-loathing” and “shame.” I’d never gone to Money Mart before, and my sense was that it was, I don’t know, pathetic.

But that’s neither here nor there: I was going to Money Mart.

I wrote Nawal a thank you note, promised myself to send her a gift when I was back in the black, then zoomed down the elevator and got into my car.

Rehearsing for Money Mart

There were people in suits marching along the sidewalks, most of them either talking on their phones or staring down at them and I wondered, as I slowly turned onto the main avenue, how people became the way they were.

How did one become the kind of person who walked every Monday through Friday to an office in order to pay for things like condos and Nikes?

I was around the same age as many of these walkers, I observed: 40-ish. But here I was living in my car, rehearsing a presentation for an employee at Money Mart, while these people here urgently spoke into their phones no doubt to other people who also walked briskly and with purpose down some other sidewalk somewhere, people with clean hair, who had almost certainly eaten a date-cashew bar on their way out some nice-looking door. These people smelled like Irish Spring.

How did they become that way and me this other way, smelling like an old sleeping bag? I wondered whether it was something you were born with, or a choice, or an environment thing, and I wondered if there was a scientific consensus on this presently.

I would have to check this on Wikipedia while I ate my sandwich. I was wondering all this because I wanted not to be the way I was anymore, and wondered if this was something that was even on the table for me.

I guess I was just thinking that a home might be nice, and — at age 39 — maybe even a family inside of one.

I put a pin in that thought for a moment, as I suddenly remembered that I’d soon be eating a sandwich. I couldn’t wait. Of all the possible sandwich options I most wanted to see for myself, the pulled pork kept stealing the show. Of course it was possible Money Mart would deny me access and crush my big dream for the day. In which case I would not cry. Not in front of the gatekeeper, anyway. I would cry at home, in my car. Maybe find someplace nice to park.

I rolled slowly towards a red light some 50 feet away and mentally reviewed the details I’d need to nail in order to ensure the best possible outcome here. At the same time, I reached for my phone and typed in the address. Then I heard a knock on the window.

I swung my head and was momentarily disoriented by two very round blue eyes and a large, shockingly bright yellow moving object filling my entire passenger window, before it all at once crystallized into a hi-vis vest being worn by a police officer on a bicycle, looking at me.

I yelped and threw my phone as though it was a dead rat, but it was too late.

“Pull over,” he said.

I did.

I rolled down the one window that was working at the moment, which, happily, was the one right in front of him. “Hello,” I said, brightly, after he’d leaned right in. We glanced down at my phone as it lay quiet and innocent on the passenger seat next to me. There was a moment of silence as we both considered it, then I looked back up at him and tried once again to smile.

He asked me for my documents.

Here’s the thing. In June I had bought, by complete mistake, a stolen vehicle from a man in Alberta, online. It’s a long story. I did get rid of it. But not before first embarking on a desperate stint of frenetic illegal activity in an effort to launder the deal, including forging some insurance papers and registration forms, and these are now what I handed over.

He took a few moments, glanced from the outside of my car to my papers, then to me again and said, “Do you own this vehicle?” The question startled me. I told him that yes, I did, but then for a moment I became very worried.

“Says here you own a black Toyota Rav4,” the officer said. “This one’s white.”

I yelped once more. “Those are the wrong papers,” I blurted out, as I tried to rip the fraudulent registration from his hands. He kindly let me, but he didn’t take his eyes off of me, peered at me keenly, with real interest as I rummaged around through my wreck.

He then took a good look around my car, his eyes scanning everything as if trying to pull out more of my story, roaming over the blankets, pillows, takeout bags and rumpled clothing, looked me directly in the eyes as I smoothed out the real documents for him, and said, “Are you currently living in your car, ma’am?”

The question hit me like a cannonball; I froze. I looked at him, speechless. It wasn’t really the question of whether I was living in my car that hurt — which it did, because I was, and being found out had a way of making me feel bad about it — but actually it was the “ma’am” that had really done it.

A turning point

At age 39, a couple of months away from 40, the ma’am signified my entrance into a category of humans I had never belonged to before: not-young women. I was now a not-young woman. Forever. Progressively. And the officer, unknowingly, had just made it official with the word ma’am, instead of “miss.”

I reeled in horror. Ma’am? Ma’am? a floating voice in my head said. I immediately realized this meant only one thing: it was not OK for me to be living in my car anymore. I was too old for that now. Living in a car was tolerated if you were young, because, well, maybe you were just taking a bit of extra time, like: hey, life is hard and confusing. Take a couple more years, why not? That was not the case for a ma’am. For a ma’am it was only one thing: failure.

I burst into tears. I didn’t want to cry in front of the police officer, or the downtown passersby, but that was just too bad. A dam in me had burst and I couldn’t stop. It was not great timing, but there it was — sorrow and despair and frustration pouring all out of me, Starbucks cups and rumpled clothing everywhere. So be it.

“Yes,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”

The officer regarded me with a mix of pity and concern in his eyes, and said he’d be right back.

I leaned my head against the steering wheel and cried while I waited for him to return. It felt nice to do that. Relaxing. I dug around for an old takeout napkin, found one on the floor and blew my nose into it. People walked by and stared at me, phones pressed to their ears, probably speaking to their loved ones and I wondered: why on Earth was I living in my car?

Who knows how people become who they are. How they manage to buy condos, and wash their hair at least once a week. That beats me. But as I sat in my car waiting for the officer to return with a ticket I couldn’t pay for, I realized none of that mattered. It was not a question of any of that; it was merely a question of falling. Or rather, of landing.

It was a question of how long I’d continue to let myself fall, how much longer I’d let life happen to me, instead of the other way around: make my life happen.

And it was a question of how long I would allow the story of surrendering and of letting go — a story that had perhaps served me well, for a moment, as I grappled with so much loss — to shape who I was and who I would become.

It was not good enough, anymore, to use karma and surrendering as excuses to do nothing, become nobody, and to remain a passive speck upon a cosmic breeze.

One of the last things my dad said to me of any consequence was, “Is your life still a mess?” I was in Whitehorse at that time. The inside of my car was a wreck, and I wondered how he could see all that from across the country.

I can’t remember how I replied to him then, probably some version of denial, sarcasm, anger and tears — my usual brew. In my defence, some months later, my therapist had said, “No, your life is not a mess. You just live differently.” But respectfully I disagreed.

Had my dad been around in that moment, as the officer peered into my Toyota, pretty sure he would’ve said, “Yup. Still a mess.”

“No ticket today,” the officer said. “But,” he added, gravely, “but ma’am? If you’ve fallen on some hard times, you can’t afford a ticket.”

I sniffed and nodded and blew my nose, put my documents away. I thanked him and promised him I wouldn’t use my phone while driving ever again, not even while rolling towards a stop.

He nodded, wished me luck and pedalled away.

I started my car up and pulled back out into the Tuesday morning traffic. I was definitely going to Money Mart, there was no doubt about it. I was also, immediately after, going to get myself that sandwich — nothing would stop me.

And there was no way, come hell or high water, that I would be living in my Toyota-home this time next year.

I gripped my steering wheel as I drove away, something in me hardening.

It was time to dig my nails in, grab a hold of something and fight for it. It could be anything.

Today I’d settle for a pulled pork sandwich.

Excerpted from ‘Better Next Year: An Anthology of Christmas Epiphanies’, edited by JJ Lee. Copyright 2023 JJ Lee. Published by Tidewater Press. Excerpted by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.