> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://the-afterword.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # sonder - URL: https://the-afterword.ghost.io/sonder/ - Published: 2026-09-11T16:57:06.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-11T16:57:06.000Z - Author: mia davi there is a small stretch of morning where a city hasn’t quite decided what everyone is yet. before people disappear behind the doors that give them titles, the streets are full of unfinished versions of them. scrubs haven’t become nurses yet. backpacks haven’t become students. a coffee and a pair of tired eyes could belong to almost anybody. everyone is suspended somewhere between who they were when they woke up and whoever they are expected to become when they arrive. i don’t usually see this part. most days i meet people after they’ve already been sorted into their places, when the sidewalks have emptied themselves into hospitals and classrooms and offices and the city has put everyone where they belong. but every once in a while you catch it before the sorting is finished, and there is something almost unsettling about seeing so many lives still in transit. they collect at red lights for a moment, strangers temporarily arranged beside one another by nothing more meaningful than traffic. people going in opposite directions stand shoulder to shoulder, each carrying whatever the morning has already managed to give them. then the light changes and they separate. there was a women in scrubs. i remember almost nothing else, which, somehow, is the part i remember the most. she passed through the small rectangle of world available through my windshield and was gone again before i had any reason to wonder who she was. i couldn’t reconstruct her face if i tried. i don’t know if she was tired or happy or heartbroken or thinking about absolutely nothing worth remembering. all i really know is that for a few seconds, her life crossed mine without either of us having to acknowledge it. and then hers kept going somewhere i couldn’t see. she had woken up that morning before i knew she existed. that thought felt strangely invasive. there had been an entire morning leading up to the six seconds i was permitted to see. maybe an alarm went off and she pressed snooze twice. maybe someone was sleeping beside her. maybe she got ready quietly because there was a baby in the next room. maybe she stood naked in front of her bathroom mirror and hated something about herself. maybe she loved herself. maybe she didn’t think about herself at all. maybe she was halfway through an argument in her head with someone who wasn’t there, rehearsing sentences she’d never actually say. and then she crossed the street. i think i forget sometimes that other people are happening when i'm not looking at them. that sounds horrible when i write it down. of course i know other people exist. i’m not under the impression that everyone gets folded up and stored somewhere when they leave my line of sight. but there is a difference between understanding that someone has a life and realizing that they are experiencing it with the same unbearable closeness that you experience yours. because mine is so loud. there is always so much happening inside my head that sometimes it feels impossible that there is enough room in the world for anyone else’s. things i need to do and things i‘ve forgotten to do and conversations i've already had that my brain has decided deserve another performance, except this time i say the right thing. things i’m excited about tangled around things i’m scared of. ideas interrupting other ideas. feelings i haven’t named yet taking up space anyway. my life has terrible acoustics. everything echos. and maybe that’s why everyone else can start to feel a little flat. a nurse crossing the street. a man carrying coffee. a student looking at their phone. the person in the car beside me. background. not because they matter less, but because i can only see them from the outside. meanwhile, i have never once seen myself from anywhere but in here. i have been present for every second of my life. every embracing thought and private grief and strange little happiness has happened with me standing directly in the middle of it. even the memories that aren’t really about me still have me tucked somewhere inside them, looking out through the same pair of eyes. i am the main character of my life because i have no other seat to sit in. and somehow every person walking downtown this morning was sitting in theirs. that is the part my brain doesn’t seem built to hold. the women in the scrubs wasn’t a women in scrubs to herself. she was *I* i am tired. i have to work. i shouldn’t have said that last night. i hope today is better. i wonder if he misses me. i need to call my mom. i forgot my lunch. i am happy. i am not happy. i don’t know yet. an entire language of *I* happening behind a face i would forget before the light even turned green. and it isn’t only strangers. i think that’s where the thought became uncomfortable. there are people i love whose faces i know so well i could probably reconstruct them from memory, people whose bodies have slept beside mine, whose voices i could pick out of a crowded room, whose habits have become so familiar that i know what they’re about to do before they do it, and i still have never known what it feels like to be them. someone can hand me their sadness in every word they have for it and i will still have to translate it into my own language. they can say *I’m overwhelmed* and i can understand it, but what i really understand is every time **I** have been overwhelmed. i know what that word has done inside my own body. i know where mine lives. i know what memories mine keeps in its pockets. i can get very close to someone else’s feeling. i can recognize it’s shape. i can sit beside it for years. but i can never experience it from the middle. which means there are people who know almost everything about me who will still only ever know the version of me that reaches the surface. and i suppose i only know the surface of them too. maybe that’s why i felt so strange watching everyone hurry past each other that morning. all those private worlds briefly occupying the same few blocks, brushing shoulders and stopping at the same lights, completely unaware of what was happening inside the person three feet away. someone could have been having the best morning of their life standing beside someone having the worst. someone might have been on their way to quit. someone might have been on their way to begin. someone might have just received a text they had been waiting months for. someone was probably just thinking about coffee. and from my car, they all looked exactly the same: people going somewhere. eventually the light changed and the woman in the scrubs disappeared behind a building. i drove forward, she kept walking, and whatever enormous thing it is to be her continued without me. i don’t know what happened next. she doesn’t know i thought about her at all. and somewhere inside a morning i considered entirely mine, i was probably six seconds of somebody else’s.