The playlist has forty-one tracks and a name: Targa, Someday. I built it the way other men build spreadsheets — compulsively, at midnight, with the specific gravity of a person rehearsing a life he has not yet earned.
The Porsche 911 Targa is not a car so much as a proposition. Silver, if we're being honest about the fantasy. Top removed, that roll hoop catching light like a piece of jewelry engineering. A machine designed less for transport than for the correction of posture.
Every song was chosen for a road that does not exist yet — coastal, undivided, the kind of asphalt cartographers draw to make insurance companies nervous. The playlist assumes wind. It assumes arrival.
But the ownership never came, and somewhere around track nineteen I understood it wasn't supposed to. The car was a pretext. The playlist was the actual acquisition — the only object I was ever really assembling.
This is the quiet fraud of aspiration: we say we want the destination, but we spend all our currency on the anticipation of it, and then act surprised when the anticipation turns out to be the better product.
There is a term in finance for a position you hold not to sell but to feel solvent — a kind of paper wealth that changes your posture without changing your bank balance. The playlist was that. Forty-one songs of paper horsepower.
I have never driven a Targa. I have curated its soundtrack for six years the way a monk curates devotion for a god he has decided not to definitively prove.
The seashore was never really the point, and neither, in the end, was the car. The point was the deferral itself — the elegant, renewable pleasure of wanting something you have arranged never to quite get.
Someday the car may arrive, silver, top down, radio already synced. It will play the playlist once, faithfully, and then the playlist will be finished — the only thing in this story with an actual ending.