I spent six hours on a plane flying west-to-east across the country and had some thoughts about the places we go, the things that take us there, and (occasionally) the people we’re with.
This is about first texts, shared backseats, and conversational routes.
on first texts
Home is having someone to text the moment you land on the ground. After hours of untethered darkness in the sky, your feet are as close to the ground as they’ve been since you started the journey. The blue lights on everyone’s screen stir to life, and you tell someone “I’m here”—and if that’s not love, I don’t know what is.
When I was younger, people would pull out their phones and you’d immediately hear the chatter of the first calls as their handheld devices made contact with cellular towers once again. The reuniting chorus of “Hello, can you hear me? My plane just landed.” The sounds of all of us, strangers, once headed to the same place in a giant metal tin with wings, and the knowledge that separation is imminent. Nowadays, it’s quieter; solemn even. Everyone, head-bent, waiting for those three dots to load with a message in return.
and I was thinking as I pulled out my phone to send a text of my own—how nice it is to have someone waiting for you, and to have something to come back to. How it’s such a simple action, but how cherished it is to be able to do it.
on shared backseats
I took my last shared Lyft ride on January 20, 2020. As I scrolled down to the bottom of my ride history, I’m reminded that it’s a map of places I’ve since been to and left: these were all journeys about needing to get to a place, or wanting to leave to go back to somewhere familiar. This is dead-time in our daily routine. The commercial break, set-dressing time. I have a number of stories from the backseat of an Uber; and they’re all not worth recounting ever again. But all these times fit in between other stories I recall and will tell another time.
There are a two things I find strangely wonderful about this.
First, is the paper record of everywhere I’ve gone and who I’ve gone with. Not the people in the car with me, but the person who took me there. All strangers, people I’ll likely never cross paths with again. But I’ve sat in the back of their vehicle: scrolling on my phone, looking out the window, in wait. We may have normalized the whole rideshare commotion a few years ago (this conversation is very 2013), but I’m still new to the transcript of where I was going on October 26st or June 17th or March 5th.
Second, is the fact that in a before-time, I had taken nearly a third of these rides with other people in the backseat. Still strangers, headed to some arbitrarily routed, yet supposedly compatible destinations. I don’t know where they were going, but we each have our own receipt of that time logged onto a little app. Maybe they met me, and someone else, and a different person after that on this day where they saved a few dollars on a ride.
and I was thinking in the backseat of this car ride I had paid for with my phone—how crazy it once was to share something as close as seats in the backseat of a stranger’s car. How there’s this hard-to-place intimacy of the proximity against the trivialness of the passing.
on conversational routes
I miss shared walking routes. It used to be the bedrock of knowing people around you, and being able to temporally and geographically orient them in a neighborhood. Having a route to walk with someone on is a signal of famliarity, as in, you and I are headed in the same direction and having some company is better than no company on our way there. It’s the acknowledgement that both of you are busy, or maybe both of you are bored, but you’d rather talk to each other than nobody at all. Those conversations are always the casual kind: catching up on the comings and goings of their lifem, a funny story that happened to them earlier in the day, or a problem they’re facing complicated by the decision they need to make.
The consistency of the routine, or even sudden encounter that turns into a shared route, is what makes it special. It happens after class because both of you are headed back in the same far direction; or you’re just finished with dinner and need to make this club meeting on time; or there really is no reason for both of you to walk together, but you bumped into each other at the same place.
Perhaps some of my most unexpected encounters have happened on these spontaneously-struck walking conversations with people I had limited famliarity with. An acquaintance or someone I loosely knew once and felt compelled by politeness, each drawn into the orbit of our feet headed in the same directions. These routes are never specific to a person: different conversations, same path. But the instant familiarity still lingers, and what I really miss is the mutality of it.
and I was thinking while walking alone on a new street with broken headphones—how lovely it is to have the familiarity of a sidewalk conversation with someone else. How you pass so many people you’re never going to talk to, yet some may walk beside you after all.
and i was thinking on the drive down.
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a preview: as the holidays come into season, I’m resolved to finish: (1) a pre-birthday retrospective; (2) a list of people; and (3) a seasonal year-in-review