I actually really like taking the car to the car wash. You might think I’m exaggerating, but it’s true. I like it enough to make a day out of it. I took myself to my favorite local coffee shop (not Starbucks) and treated myself to a horchata foam cold brew (I know). Then I drove over to the nearest, coolest car wash. I’m talking put-your-car-in-neutral-so-it-goes-on-its-own kind of car wash. I was ready.

I lined the car up, put it in neutral, and let it roll. I turned the radio off too. I like to be in silence during the duration of the car wash as well as when I’m vacuuming. It gives my mind the chance to pause and think, see what comes up.

Well, something did come up. As I vacuumed a floor mat, I remembered a paragraph I read that morning from Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (True Diary):

I kept making list after list of the things that made me feel joy. And I kept drawing cartoons of the things that made me angry. I kept writing and rewriting, drawing and redrawing, and rethinking and revising and reediting. It became my grieving ceremony (True Diary, 178).

I thought about my own mourning of things—ambitions, old ways, the past—and how I could help myself grieve. Alexie—writing as a Native American student in a majority white high school—found his own way of coping with the loss of his grandmother, the only person who truly believed in him.

Which gets me thinking. Maybe silent car washes are part of my own grieving ceremony.