Farewell, My 1st Driving License

Milas

On an October day fifteen years ago, I stood on the black steel stairs of the dreadful brick building in The College of Science, 10 KH was its name? Anyways, I knew I was going to be late for my Calculus class but I couldn’t move my feet, for I had just been handed my first driver’s license ever! A small laminated card that said I was free to drive a car and go anywhere I wanted whenever I felt like it. Well, technically I had to take permission from my parents but you get the idea. I gazed at the expiration date and it said 11 October 2013 and I laughed, thinking to myself that fifteen years is a very long time indeed and god knows what will happen and where will we be in those fifteen years.

I went to my class, I aced my Caclulus with an A, and I drove around all of Kuwait in my car, making the most use out of that little laminated card and for two years straight I played nothing on my car’s cassette player -yes cassette!- but Brother Loui. Anyone who knew me back then and happens to hear Brother Loui these days immediately dedicates it to me. Fifteen years passed by like a droplets of water sneaking through a sieve without my counting them, until the day my husband asked me “What day does your driver’s license expire?”

I took out my now poor and dismantled drivers license which after fifteen years of service has come apart and is barely holding it together. I check the date and my husband was right, fifteen years have passed already! Where did the time go? How did this happen? Why am I supposed to give up my blue card of freedom with a picture of 18 years old me smiling up at the camera with all the innocence of the world in my eyes!

At first I refused to give my driving license up! This little plastic card means more to me than any other card I had in my wallet, she and I go a long way back, been through so much together, and she is the oldest official laminated card I have in my possession. Giving it up meant giving up the little wide-eyed teenager in me who was just starting up her life and had all the world to conquer. It meant that I am old, and that day I dismissed as very far off while being late to my Calculus class is finally here.

After an actual tug of war, where I kept retrieving my card from my now angry husband in the name of taking a final photograph. He finally pulled it away, muttering at my apparent madness. Its only a driving license, he said. I will be back with your new one. I cried my eyes out, asking him to at least have them give me back my old one, just for the sake of keeping it with me. He slammed his car door and drove away, leaving me longing for one last moment with my first and most beloved during license.

Only a sentimental person would understand my disappointment when I was giving my new driving license without my old one. I now hate the new driving license, which is not laminated and has a barcode and two scanned pictures of mine and says my profession is an employee, not a student. The expiry date of this new card is 6 October 2028 which is also fifteen years away. I truly hope that god grants me to live, well and healthy, until I see that date with my loved ones. I wonder how fast the next fifteen years would go and when the day insha2 Allah comes how I would be feeling then.

Farewell, my first driving license. You’ve been my trusted friend for a very long time now. I hope you are disposed off in a dignified manner and that you are not sitting somewhere, feeling cold and neglected

Have you ever felt the weight of the years as you handed in your official documents for replacement, like a driving license perhaps? Did you make a scene or just let go quietly?

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