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My melancholy mood didn’t really make sense as I stood on the sidewalk and watched my car turn the corner, pulled by a tow truck, two wheels on the ground, rolling out of sight for good. Why was I grieving a hunk of metal? It was just a car. This was always going to be the conclusion of a depreciating asset. I’d known that since I bought it more than a decade prior.

But signing the title over felt like the intersection of empty nesters sending their kids off to college and the death of a family pet. Strangers were going to enter my Nissan and desecrate it, dismember it part by part like an organ donor. It deserved a better death than that. Couldn’t it have been sold to a high schooler who needed a way to get to work and a weekend refuge to hotbox with friends? Or, better yet, couldn’t the Kia Boys have taken it for a joy ride, testing its handling in ways that I never did, and getting me an insurance payout in the process?

Part of the reason it was so hard to say goodbye was how abruptly it left. I had just washed the car — soaped the exterior, vacuumed the rugs, sprayed shiny protectant on the dashboard. I didn’t know I was preparing it for a funeral. I hardly had a chance to process its loss when, over the course of a few days, a failed transmission changed it from a reliable surf-mobile ready for a summer of camping trips to an irreparable piece of junk that makes the plump men of predatory junkyards salivate.

I took my last few belongings out of the car before handing over the keys. Every crevice triggered memories from a vault spanning more than a decade. Nostalgia oozed from the vents, where, over the years, a loose piece of plastic had transitioned from utter annoyance to road trip white noise. Resting on the fabric seats sparked flashbacks of a freezing night spent sleeping in the driver’s seat at the Grand Canyon, of thousand-mile road trips to the Pacific Northwest, of surfboards stretching from the windshield to the trunk, of a first kiss leaning over the center console.

I can survive without a car. I lived three years of my life without one when I was younger. But a car, even a tiny one, was the key to unleashing my pent-up desire to explore. Together, we traversed the Sierra Nevada, squeezed through the rusty valleys of the Mojave Desert, cruised under the shade of the tallest trees in the world, and journeyed far off the pavement of rural San Diego.

As I shut the driver’s door one last time, I imagined 23-year-old me walking out of the bank with a car loan in my hand. I remembered the concern of adding another six grand to my already negative net worth, and the simultaneous relief of finally accessing the independence of a vehicle. And I really didn’t care what model I got. It was the cheapest, least cool car on the market. No one with any sort of financial means would ever buy a Nissan Versa. But that’s all I could afford, and I wasn’t ashamed. Actually, I learned to love that four-door hatchback with go-kart-sized wheels, even as it struggled to break 55 mph going uphill.

Ten years later, my Nissan didn’t look as spry as it did in 2016. It still had the “no smoking” sticker on the passenger window from its previous life as a rental. But it had accumulated kisses from anonymous parallel-parkers on the curbs of San Diego, and scratches from when I used to park too close to the laundry machine in my garage. We had aged together. For every scratch on its silver armor, the UV rays of Southern California had bestowed me a new sunspot of my own.

So as a tow truck marched my Nissan toward the gallows, I couldn’t take my gaze off it, daydreaming of people and places from my past. It was just a haggard car as it slipped away around the corner, but it felt like so much more.