I'm often fascinated by the bumper stickers people put on their cars. Sometimes political in message, other times amusing or espousing a kind of annotated version of one's life philosophy, it's always seemed to me like a really odd place to put a message. If your car is parked next to another car, it will certainly be difficult to see. If you're driving at any kind of decent speed, and able to be read by the person behind you, they're most certainly too close. A traffic jam seems physically like the ideal time to take in the message of the person in front of you, but emotionally, probably not.
In these times we live in, where everyone is constantly looking down at their smartphones, I often have a kind of floating feeling, like I'm not really sure if I'm here at all. There are people around me, but they seem to be somewhere else and here at the same time. I wonder if the people they're texting, or the news or pictures they're seeing, are as real as me. It's like living in a painting where the perspective is off. It's hard to feel rooted.
I thought that this bumper sticker makes some sense, in that it expresses some of these feelings for me. If it's on the rear bumper on my car (as it has been), the person behind me would need to be pretty close to me to see it, but to read it well would have to be seeing it in their rear view mirror, so it would no longer be backwards. Their relationship to me in that position would be strange. In a way, that seems to make sense.
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