first love?

Prompt: Write about your favorite place - natural setting or otherwise. Imagine how it might be changed in your lifetime?

Note: I've gotten a similar prompt before, and have gone a similar direction, but that first time I was reprimanded, because it wasn't a real place. evs, yo. So this is the very first draft (that has a lot of holes and needs a lot of help) of a story I've been meaning to write for a really long time.
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First Love?
They say you never forget your first love. Augh, cliché, I know, but I think “they” might be on to something. Given, my story is not a typical one, but bear with me on this one. This is the story of me and Joe. Oh I loved him, but I didn’t know it.
I remember the first time my dad brought him home. I thought he was the ugliest thing I had ever seen. Slightly boxy, completely unattractive, and nothing I would ever want to be seen with. He stuck around anyway.
My sister got him first, of course. She was older, so she had first dibs. She didn’t treat him right at all. Spilled drinks, accidents, scars. Poor guy.
I got Joe the summer before my senior year of high school. I finally got my driver’s license and now I had my first car, Joe Warrior. He was still nameless at this point, and I still hated him. He was even uglier now that my sister had used him. She ran him into a trailer hitch the winter before, so he had a bent bumper and a holey faceplate. Not to mention the fact that she let the road salt eat away at the paint job. He started out a nice white, and by the time I got him, he was more of a coffee stain tan. She had also neglected to change the oil for about eleven months, and hadn’t filled the wiper wash for about three.
There were so many things wrong with him. There was no air conditioning, which is incredibly unpleasant in 95-degree heat. Once winter came, I found out the heat didn’t work all that great either, and frost had a habit of condensing on the inside of the windows, instead of outside. One of the back doors didn’t unlock, and the front speaker on the driver’s side took five minutes to turn on.
For being a 1991 Chevy Cavalier, he had obviously seen better days. Through out the year, I began to get really attached to Joe. He had the most comfortable seats, and many of my passengers accidentally fell asleep, even on short drives. The seatbelts didn’t slide up your chest and rub against your neck, and once we got the heat fixed, I usually had to roll down the windows because it got too warm. And, despite the glitch with the front speaker, the rest of the sound system was amazing, and the tape deck worked fantastically.
Joe and I had some good times. I loved driving out into the old highways, where all you could see was cornstalks and soybeans for miles. Joe’s top speed was 70, and that was plenty for me. On a warm summer day, with all the windows rolled down (cranks, no automatic windows for Joe), stereo blasting a Beach Boys cassette, I would drive all over the farmland that bordered my hometown. Those were great days.
Then Joe started to fall apart some more. I left for college, and he was left sitting in the driveway for eight months of the year. He started to burn oil, and over heat. To keep the engine cool, I had to leave the heat on, even in the summer. The light in the trunk disconnected, his rear passenger turn signal shorted out and blinked twice as fast. My parents would have a few of the things fixed, but it was getting to the point where he was just getting old.
The summer before my senior year of college, my dad informed me that the next time anything broke on Joe, they were going to get rid of him. My heart dropped, and I actually went upstairs and cried for twenty minutes. I was crying over a car! How silly of me… right? It wasn’t until that moment that I realized how much I had grown to love the ugly heap of metal that lived in our driveway. I had spent so much time, learning how to drive in him, taking road trips, surviving some terrifying moments in a snow drift, the thought of losing him was unacceptable to me.
Joe lasted through the summer. Towards the end I couldn’t take him farther than 15 miles, or anything that required more than 45 MPH. He stopped shifting gears and eventually just sat in the driveway, unused. I knew my parents were going to take him, once I left, so I cut the middle seatbelt out of the back seat as a memento. On the inside of the back driver’s side door, I wrote “LULU ©s JOE” in Sharpie. A little weird, I know, but just in case anyone else ended up with him, I wanted them to know that he was loved and they needed to take care of him.
My dad ended up selling Joe to a friend of his a month after I left. My mom told me that there was $100 in an envelope for me, because he really was my car. After I hung up with her, I cried all over again. I had lost my love, Joe. He was in the hands of someone else. When I went home for winter break, I actually saw someone driving him. My heart leapt, and then fell to my stomach. He was no longer mine.
Three months into spring semester, my dad told me that his friend had Joe junked. All that is left of my beloved first car is a square of steel that is going to be melted down and made into screws and nails. Thinking about it still makes me quite sad, but I still have my seatbelt and my car key. A few mementos of a first love.