A Bluetooth Connection

You may not realize exactly how much of your information is stored in your fancy new car. Right off the bat if you’ve ever connected any sort of Bluetooth device then at a minimum your name is in there. It’s always the first thing I check whenever I get into a new car. Once my curiosity is satisfied I usually delete it all. I try to be a good man like that, do the world a favor and so on.

But the car I bought last month had only had one owner before me and something about her name… It just captivated me. There was something innocent about it something charming and sweet. I couldn’t bring myself to delete it. I really wasn’t going to do anything with it. I just liked to look at it from time to time and imagine what sort of person she might be. I could practically picture her; petite, kind, soft spoken… Working in some sort of creative field maybe? I’ll admit I may have spent slightly more time thinking about her than was healthy. But it was all just harmless daydreaming.

Mostly harmless. I guess I may have been a little overly preoccupied. After one too many one sided conversations, my girlfriend ended up breaking up with me. I think she thought I was cheating on her. She was wrong of course but not too far off I guess.

I knew I just needed to just stop thinking about my lovely car girl. I thought if I just knew a little bit more about her I could forget about her. She wouldn’t be the perfect girl I’d imagined, just a regular flawed person like the rest of us.

All I had to go on was a moderately uncommon first name. Not the greatest start. Luckily I had more than my fair share of ingenuity, technical know-how and spare time on my hands. I had just enough tricks up my sleeve that I was able to access the drafts of a number of text messages that she must have sent using the voice control in the car.

I thought those might disabuse me of my notion of her as sweet, kind, and innocent. Maybe some particularly raunchy sexts or evidence of her leading some poor helpless sap along. Something that would prove to me that she was nothing special just as trashy and selfish as any other woman. Honestly part of me wishes that HAD been what I found.

Instead all I learned was that she was not being appreciated by the people that were lucky enough to be a part of her life. Texts after texts of her venting about selfish and inconsiderate boyfriends, reaching out to her friends and loved ones whenever they needed anything, going above and beyond for those in her life. But were they appreciating her like she deserved to be appreciated? Loving her like she deserved to be loved? I know they weren’t. I KNOW they weren’t.

I had to find her. She needed me. She deserved so much better. I never imagined a day would come in my life that I would be stymied by the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act but I found myself quite frustrated when I was rudely turned away from the DMV with absolutely no information.

The next stop was the dealership where I had originally bought the car. Obviously I couldn’t tell them what I really needed so I tried my best to sell the story that I needed to see the bill of sale from when they had acquired the car. I wove a long narrative involving a man getting aggressive with me and claiming that it was his car that had previously been stolen. Now the police were involved and my whole life was in shambles. At least the last part was the truth. Ugh. Apparently it’s “not their policy to give out that information” but they would be “happy to cooperate with the police to corroborate the fact that the car was legitimately acquired”. Assholes.

Luckily I’m quite resourceful. I still had a few tricks up my sleeve. I was able to use the car’s VIN to look up its history and find out what locations it had been associated with. My sweet girl had been on some serious journeys. The car had made some long cross country treks.

I wondered if she had been lonely making those long trips all by herself. I almost brought myself to tears imaging her driving down a dark highway in the middle of the night, starting to fall asleep and drifting across lanes. She wasn’t safe on her own. She needed someone to protect her. She didn’t even know that you needed to delete your Bluetooth information for God’s sake!

Luckily once I had the locations it was relatively easy to find her on social media. Like I said she had a relatively uncommon first name. I was sort of hoping that she might be some repulsive Midwestern mom and I could put the whole thing behind me. Unfortunately, she was… exactly what I’d pictured. Petite hourglass frame, large blue eyes, lips as pink as a rose petal and just as soft, I imagined. She was, of all things, a kindergarten teacher. Can you get any sweeter than that?

Apparently you can. Every single picture of her was something wholesome and pure. Her serving food at a homeless shelter, her cleaning up a local park, her walking a three legged rescue dog. In every picture she beamed like an angel, full of beauty and humility in equal measure.

Once I laid eyes on her I knew I was beyond hope. She was the one good thing in my universe the one thing that could turn my pathetic life around. And she needed me too. She needed someone to keep her safe. She was so vulnerable; it had been so easy to find her. If I could do it then any crazy weirdo who might want to hurt her could certainly do it. I had to find her first.

It was a fifteen-hour drive but I didn’t care. I got in my car and drove all night. I only stopped once. I was so fueled by my burning desire to find her, to have her, to keep her safe. Unfortunately, it took me a little while to find where she actually lived. Her social media didn’t have her actual address listed but I could see from the pictures what her house looked like and there are only so many residential streets in a rural Midwestern town. When I finally found it I felt like I was in a dream. I was so close to irrefutable happiness. It took all my restraint not to pound on her door right that second in the middle of the night.

The first time I knocked on her door some guy answered. He had the audacity to ask me what I wanted, like he lived there or something. I had a whole plan in my head for how things would go and this completely threw me off. I mumbled something about the wrong house and hurried back to my car. I would just have to wait until I was sure that he had left and she was there. Believe me I recognize how crazy this all sounds but I swear I knew her life would be so much better with me. It was fate that I had ended up with this car.

It took a couple of days of waiting before there was a time where she was home and he was not. Seeing him come and go from her house made me fume. Who the hell did he think he was? Did he think that he could possibly know her like she deserved? Love her like she deserved? He probably didn’t even appreciate how lucky he was. When she was finally mine I would never leave her side, not for a single heartbeat.

Seeing her come and go on the other hand made my heart flutter. It was like seeing an angel walk down the street. Just her presence made me tremble with pure joy and love. Everything would be better if could just get her to see that we were meant to be together. She would be my motivation, my inspiration. I would finally be able to turn things around for myself. I was so busy day dreaming about our life together that I almost didn’t notice when the man finally left. How could he even leave her alone and unprotected like that? Didn’t he know that some lunatic could come along and hurt her? That was exactly why she needed someone like me around.

Everything would have been fine. Everything would have been FINE if she would have just heard me out. If she would have just been a little bit patient she would have seen that our lives would be perfect together. But I was nervous! Who wouldn’t be?

I guess I didn’t explain myself particularly well. It all came out in sort of a jumbled rush. I could barely believe that I was actually standing in front of her, actually looking into her beautiful eyes. In retrospect it probably didn’t help that I pushed my way into the house. Perhaps she would have been a little bit more receptive if I had just talked to her from the front step. But everyone makes mistakes and I’m only human. What’s done is done.

I had just barely gotten through explaining how I had found her and I was JUST about to explain to her how it was fate and why she needed me so badly when she started to freak out shouting that I needed to get out of her house and that she would call the police if I ever came anywhere near her ever again.

If she had just given me a minute to explain myself, if she hadn’t FREAKED out, everything would be fine. She didn’t understand that she needed me, that I could make her life so much better. I just needed another minute to explain myself I swear.

But she grabbed her phone to call the police.

Obviously I couldn’t let that happen. Obviously. What good would I be to her in jail? How could I possibly make her see how much I loved her from jail?

She’d be all alone, vulnerable to all the people who didn’t appreciate her, all the people who might want to hurt her if I didn’t protect her.

What happened next… really wasn’t what I intended. I just wanted to grab her phone out of her hand. I needed to buy myself just a little bit more time to make myself understood. But she jerked away from me as I tried to grab it and she lost her balance. As she fell backward her head hit the corner of the kitchen counter top with a thud that sent a wave of nausea all the way into the pit of my stomach. At the same time, although she dropped her phone, the call to 911 managed to go through. My time was officially up.

I’ll admit at this point I panicked. I probably should have checked a little more carefully but man, that thud. It definitely did not sound survivable. I knew I had to get out there as fast as humanely possible and there was no way in hell I was going to leave her behind for those jerks who didn’t even appreciate how lucky they were to be close to her.

I wrapped her up in a blanket and rushed her out to the trunk of my car hoping to go unnoticed. She was light as a feather and I was overcome with a wild and desperate wave of despair that I had never gotten to hold her while she was still alive.

I guess maybe she wasn’t dead after all. I can hear her thumping and screaming back there. I’m half tempted to let her out, to try to explain myself one last time, to help her understand that the only possibility that has any meaning is for the two of us to spend the rest of our lives together. Somehow I suspect she may not be in the mood for listening.

It’s okay though. Everything can still be fine. We can still be together for the rest of our lives. We can be together forever. I’m recording this note with the voice control feature in my car so that hopefully when you find us, whoever you are, you’ll understand why things had to be this way. I’m really not a bad guy but this was fate. At this point this is the best possible outcome for me. For us. We deserve each other and we deserve this. I just hope the car’s computer survives the water damage.