Why I still have to marry a mechanic: Ode to my Thunderbird

 This is another short little essay for my Nonfiction English Class. The prompt was 500 words on "Cars." Just for fun, my professor said we could submit these essays to the "Readers Write" section in The Sun Magazine.

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Well-meaning friends and gas station attendants always ask what happened to my passenger side mirror. “It fell off somewhere,” I answer profoundly, and usually they have no further questions.
    I would like to think that my 90’s radio antenna was transported to that same fabled “somewhere,” along with whatever metal gizmo made my heater work before it corroded into rusty scraps and left me to slam the glovebox while driving over a speed bump to kindle some warmth from the deep caverns of the heating mechanism.
Hopefully the clinking part that once permitted the unlocking of my passenger side door has gone to rest there as well. The trigger inside the seatbelt that made it lock properly without surgical maneuvering on part of the buckler must be there, too. I sincerely desire that the never-seen cog or wheel that transmits washing fluid from some container under the hood to my windshield, cleaning it so that I don’t have to keep a spray bottle of Windex behind my seat, has joined them. Maybe the missing link that makes my cruise control engage is also part of their company.
    The myth of the elephants’ graveyard originated from old stories of hunters and people groups finding elephant skeletons congregated together. It has been romanticized that old elephants make pilgrimage to the graveyard when their time has come. Others speculate that elephants band together in times of famine or disease and then all die, littering their bones to rot within close proximity to one another. The elephants’ graveyard as depicted in the Lion King was terrifying, I’m sure you remember it, full of dark shadows cast by sharp bones onto piles of ashes. Also: hyenas and green hellfire.
    I imagine that these spiritually dead parts of my car have also found each other, after acknowledging that their time had come to an end. The hellfire in this elephants’ graveyard of car parts is fueled by dozens of paper receipts from visits to the mechanic, the auto parts store, and grocery stores that sell motor oil and ice scrapers. The shadows in this graveyard are freakishly grotesque, mechanical and oily. The wind slinking around the parts sounds like the regretful sighs of my father, when I tell him about this noise or that piece that’s hanging down. I sometimes don’t tell him about the horrible soul-wrenching sounds that come from my car. Don’t sounds usually go away like colds if you just wait long enough? Additionally, I want to avoid those sighs of his and the responsibility they make me feel, for it was me who wanted to buy it; “Please, daddy.” However, after ignoring a certain sound for too long and burning through my brakes to whatever nasty noisy part is behind the brakes, I had to adopt plan B, consult my dad, and get the brakes replaced.
    For all of my efforts to be a self-sufficient, wise, worldly, sassy,  and trash-talking woman of 21 who doesn’t need a man to take care of her, darn it, I am still a pitiful pouting Sleeping Beauty when it comes to my car.