In a last-ditch attempt to experience some form of human connection, attorney Rachel Murphy has been parking her car in the worst ways possible everywhere she goes, in the hopes that someone, anyone will leave a note of any kind on her windshield.
“The last handwritten note I got was from my grandma, and she’s dead now,” Murphy told us, while scraping her chassis on the roots of an old elm tree. “Everyone always leaves me.”
She insists she doesn’t enjoy the problems she causes; she’s just hoping a nearby stranger will become enraged enough by her shitty parking job to scribble a passive-aggressive note calling her the scum of the earth and leave it on her car.
“Sometimes I leave myself notes under my windshield,” she tells us, while parking her SUV horizontally across three spots for compact cars, “but it’s just not the same.”
Since her last breakup, Rachel confides that it’s been almost a year since she last felt any kind of real interaction with another human being, and that maybe the sharp sting of a stranger’s insult might cure what ails her.
Rachel feels the lack of connectivity at her job every day, where she volunteers as a lighthouse keeper for a purely historical, non-functioning lighthouse. “I guess I was always prone to long bouts of loneliness. On second thought, I probably shouldn’t have become a lighthouse keeper.”
“You know how sometimes you’re at party and you’re in a room full of people but somehow you’ve never been more alone?” she asks, stepping out of her double-parked car taking up two handicapped parking spaces. “No one invites me to those parties.”
For now, she’ll continue her daily routine of,tapping the rear bumper of the car in front of her with her own bumper at the grocery store right before she skips in.
And each time, she’ll be looking out for a little treasure waiting under her wipers that says something like “STUPID ISN’T A DISABILITY” or “GO GET FUCKED, ASSHAT”.
“Every morning I wake up and check my windshield just praying that somebody will have called me a lazy fucking idiot, because honestly I just want to feel again.” She gives us one last smile before slowly drifting across someone’s front lawn until her front end collides gently with the stoop.
