I'll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK?: Tales of Driving and Being Driven

by Naomi Shihab Nye

It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don’t have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in.

Riding around neighborhoods in the evenings, in the backseat of anyone’s car, before shades were dropped or curtains closed, one might spy on other families through their lit windows—seeing a piano, a painting, a table set for dinner—my overactive nostalgia-tinged brain wanted to meet them. Weirdly, I missed them even before I met them.

You’ll put your life in the hands of people you don’t know a million times. And it will be fine. This is the human condition? Our lives in the hands of people we don’t know? This is the human condition. And trust me, you know everyone. You know them because you’re human.

All the lives that weren’t ours. We could stare at them, which made them ours in a different way. If you held something inside your head—a delicious line of pearly buttons, a folded sweater, fancy perfume bottles on a shiny mirror on a counter, a silver bracelet on a wrist—it became yours, too. You couldn’t lose it.