Shotgun

Photo Credit to Ana Karolina Pereira on Pexels

The front seat of his car was dangerous and yet she found herself there more times than she could count. It was always reserved for her, not asked or offered, just expected. Someone trusted to drive her from school events and on grocery runs. That someone made sure the front seat was empty and available for her. Made sure she sat up front, the back seat was too cramped, too uncomfortable. Someone who needed her there within reach. Little did she know that shotgun was her death sentence. 

She learned to make herself small in that seat, to angle her body toward the nearest exit, to count every minute and every second until freedom. Streetlights and stop signs blurred into one as each second felt like an eternity. The passenger seat became a cage with a seatbelt, a space where she had to be still and endure. She would dream of being a bird and slipping through the window crack to fly away from her cage. A strapped cage where an unwanted hand might rest too long on her thigh. Where comments about her being mature for her age and how shorts would make her more beautiful would be heard. She learned to tune everything out and disappear within herself as soon as she sat in that cursed seat. 

She stopped calling shotgun in anyone’s car for years, even after it ended and she was old enough to refuse rides. The passenger seat carried the weight of those memories; the backseat was always more comfortable. She came up with every excuse she could as to why she preferred the back. She would say or do anything to avoid going back to that seat, that position, that vulnerability, that echo of powerlessness. 

Until him. 

He came out of nowhere, as they say. It wasn’t immediately clear to her that he had engaged in healing her and reintroduced her to the passenger seat. He rebuilt the seat just for her, and turned it into a beautiful place that had nothing to do with a cage. The first time he picked her up, she reached for the back door automatically. 

He looked at her with curiosity in his eyes, “You prefer the back?” 

She hesitated, reaching for the backseat became muscle memory. His asking  her if she preferred the back gave her a choice. It wasn’t a command. He didn’t assume she would want the front seat nor did he push it. She slid into the passenger seat, her body tensing up with old reflexes. 

His hands stayed on the steering wheel. His eyes stayed on the road with occasional glances filled with concern.

 “What do you usually listen to?” 

That question snapped her out of her counting daze. When she said no to music, he listened and turned it off. The drive was just a drive, and he made it just that. 

It took months. Dozens of drives. Road trips where she discovered  the passenger seat could mean something else entirely. That it could mean watching him smile at her music choices. That it could mean rolling the window down and letting her hand become that bird and surf the wind of freedom. It meant them splitting a bag of gas station candy and his presence beside her solid and safe. 

The day she realized  she had stopped counting seconds and stopped wanting to flee was during one of their longest road trips. Hours of highways and hills stretched ahead, and it finally hit her that she was sitting in the passenger seat completely relaxed and even had her feet up on the dashboard. As they sang off-key to songs they both loved, she realized  the cursed seat had become her favorite place to be. He had given her something  she never had before. The knowledge that she could ask him to pull over and he would. That she could say stop and he would. Her comfort was his priority, that love looked like respect and patience. 

Now when they drive, she calls shotgun. Loudly, playfully she races him to the car. He unknowingly fixed a broken part of her. The front seat of his car is not dangerous. It has become her favorite place in the world. A place filled with meaningful conversations that lasted till sunrise. Comfortable silence punctuated the first time she held his hand while he drove. A place where she is safe, a place she chose. 

She sits shotgun now and it means everything to her.