My best friend and I replaced my car’s cabin air filter last weekend. It was long overdue — the AC spewed stale air that was barely preferable to leaving the vents off. Even at the strongest setting, it blew only a sigh. After I fiddled with the glove box for far too long, the filter finally loosened from its mounting. 

There is something instinctually embarrassing about revealing the unclean parts of oneself to another. It is like admitting to your sleeping mother that you threw up and did not make it to the bathroom. Even when offered in good faith, these moments are breeding grounds for shame.

The filter was mangled. Among the expected dirty spots and lint clumps was a mass of unidentifiable fluff. It was not quite dust, nor loose threads of hair or fabric. The pile was gray and fine and soft to the touch, littered with leaf bits. This debris looked intentional, and was certainly not normal.

A week prior, I pressed 12 different sticky notes onto the wall above my desk. On each, I scrawled notes to myself about essays due, ideas for writing, miscellaneous bills and a random assortment of tasks I had been ignoring. At the top of sticky note number five was “car? oil leak?”

There comes a time in every semester when feeding yourself becomes less desirable than starving. I wouldn’t call the cycle Sisyphean — when my boulder of responsibility reaches the weekend, I peer down the slope, shrug and roll it back to the bottom by choice.

I wait on the bus each morning, studying the trees across the street. I imagine ways to describe how light shines through their leaves without cliche. I request a stop at Fifth and Tennyson. I drift through class, and then I’m home again.

Another friend calls me for advice and asks how I’m doing. I’d like to tell her that I’m kind of becoming a hermit and that I’m eating bagged popcorn for dinner. Instead, I say I’m “busy but managing.” I almost say that I think a mouse was living in my engine bay, and that I killed or otherwise evicted it. That the new filter fits perfectly in the mount and my vents smell marginally fresher.

I tell myself the mouse was already gone. When we finish working on the car, my best friend says they bought a racing game and one of those fake steering wheels that vibrates when you crash. They say they suck at it and want me to try because I am a bad driver and would also probably suck.

Instead, we stare at a sudden party invitation and then at each other. Our hands are still greasy. We started with replacing a gasket, which became replacing the spark plugs, which became replacing the air filter. Finally, surrounded by tools and paper towels, the car was back together. 

We agree to stay home because we both have homework and more productive things to do. They explain the racing game, but we never get around to playing it. They say the tracks all exist in real life and that you can buy every model of Porsche that exists. The possibilities are endless, they say. Isn’t that cool?

I keep thinking about how small the mouse must have been. Was the filter warm? What must it feel like to be in motion without seeing the road ahead? I choose to believe that it found the car unnerving and nested somewhere stationary. Somewhere else.

But maybe the mouse liked the warmth too much. Perhaps the routine of returning to the dark little corner was enough to keep it tolerant when the heat turned painful. Was ignition like a small apocalypse? Did its nest protect it from the fumes and fire and brimstone? 

I ask my best friend if we can play their game next weekend or maybe on Wednesday when we’re both free. They say they might have stuff to do, but that we should play anyway because they bought an add-on for new cars.

I can’t say for sure if my world will be burning again by Wednesday, or if the flame will look like sunlight shining through leaves across the street.