Dear Future Self,

When you look back from your pared down world, and you bitterly think how silly and blind you were to ever complain about 'having' to travel everywhere in the car, stop.

Once or twice or ten times upon a time, you were driving at night and were suddenly struck down by awe that everyone slid around in these little living rooms on wheels, and that you were sliding around with them.

Often, when you were a passenger, you thought about how all the cars on the freeway were self-contained universes and all these universes were 10 feet away from each other, but remained wholly separate unless they threatened to collide.

Riding in someone else's car was like rummaging furtively through their bathroom cabinets. Some people kept changes of clothes in their cars. The cigarettes they couldn't smoke at home. Wrappers from the food that they wouldn't count in their diet journals, if they had them.

Riding with a stranger in a car made you very quickly not be strangers anymore, at least before the plague of texting. Sitting in silence with the world sliding by was awkward. We were wired to think time was passing when we saw forty miles of anything, even road. More time than forty minutes. We traveled forty miles, how could we not have said anything? We used to be on the beach, and now we're in the mountains, so how could we not have said anything at all?

Getting in the car with someone familiar after a long day was a sigh of relief and dozing in the passenger seat with your face pressed against the windshield was even better than doing it on the couch.

Don't worry. I appreciated them.