Sharing Cars with Strangers
Part II
As long as I can remember, I’ve made up stories for the lives others lead. Riding in a stranger’s car only fuels this compulsion.
It feels like serendipity, even if it’s an algorithm that matched us.
A text message: Your driver is here. A minute later, the intimacy of sitting beside him, wondering about his neuroses and what makes him feel fulfilled.
Isaac accepts that his oldest daughter is giving him attitude because she’s 14, not because he’s a bad father. He knows it gets better after they turn 18 or 19, and I can corroborate. I imagine he takes her to Giants games and gets frustrated when she won’t look away from Snapchat or Instagram. I imagine he’s run out of open-ended questions to ask. I imagine he wonders what it will feel like one day when they’re friends.
Sami has more tattoos than she can remember. Some are silly — I’ve never understood why people get frivolous things like My Little Pony tattooed on their bodies — but Sami is the kind of person who doesn’t like to worry about the things you can’t change. I expect she only drinks whiskey and frequents dive bars where people wear beanies even when it’s warm outside. She probably moved to San Francisco when she was young enough to be impressionable and conscious of judgments and full of some regrets.
Amir played football in high school. His coach forced the team to do pilates, which he thought was ridiculous. I picture him growing up in a suburb of Atlanta, one of a few Muslim kids at his high school. I wonder if he chose to hang out with the white kids, and whether that was a big deal. I wonder if he always felt like he could only fit in halfway, and if anyone noticed. I wonder what football players look like when they do pilates.
Meredith lives in the Mission but moved in before the gentrification really started. Her brother lives down the street, and it’s good to have him nearby, but I bet they both feel guilty about living so far away from home. They’re probably from a town with one small airport and bitter winters. She likes the same TV shows I do, and goes to some the same concerts. We could be slightly awkward but earnest friends, eating home-cooked brunch and sharing our guilt.
I often snap back to reality when it’s time to say “oh, you can pull over just after the intersection — the right side would be great — thanks.”
I feel the fuzzy self-consciousness of doing something embarrassing that no one else quite notices.
Maybe it’s unfair to fill in the gaps between truths.
Or maybe it’s part of the coping we all do — with the unbearable one-ness of being limited and full of gaps, existing here in the passenger seat, separate from the world’s billions of strangers.
