n the story I tell myself, things are different. He pulls a rather dangerous u-ey at the next intersection and parallel parks on the other side of the street. I cross over like my legs are being controlled by someone else and I almost get hit by a car before I make it to the other curb but I do make it there, and just as he’s getting out of his Porsche. He smiles. I don’t say my first thought which is that someone with a Porsche shouldn’t drive like an asshole. You’d think a man who starred in not one, not two, but three animated movies about sentient automobiles would know that. Anyway, he’s there, and I’m there, and we give each other this look. Hey you, he says. Hey Lightning McQueen, I say. The resulting shoulder-punch sends thousands of volts through both of our bodies. He asks if I wanna get out of here and I say yes even though I was actually on my way to meet you.
Cut to a scene inside of his car in some deserted parking lot where Delilah is playing on the radio and we’re sighing into each other’s mouths to drown out her voice -- me, a jammed-up printer; him, a Dyson vacuum. Our legs wind around each other; our hands are in each other’s hair -- his, a field of wheat; mine, a clump of brambles. I glide my lips down his stomach and peer up at him from the fly of his pants and I know he won’t say anything weird about my nose because they’re identical and he says, hey you, and I say, hey Lightning McQueen. I fiddle with the brass knob of his jeans but then his phone goes off. He lets it vibrate in his pocket against my forearm a few times and then answers, and mostly nods a lot, and then hangs up. Pixar, I say, knowing somehow. Pixar, he says. They’re thinking about Cars 4, he says, and they want to meet with me now. I say I understand and he drives me home but by then it’s too late to call you, so I just sigh myself to sleep. The next day I tell you all of this and you understand and everything is forgiven because, I mean, it’s Owen Wilson. But the truth is, I was never on my way to you. The truth is, I never even saw Owen Wilson. The truth is, I was too scared to get out of bed.
And even if I had, if I had been walking down the road and he’d driven past me, I would have been too busy counting steps in my head to look up.