There is a particular kind of conversation that only happens in rideshares. Call it captive proximity: a stranger driving you somewhere, both of you facing forward, their face arriving only in fragments in the rearview mirror, eye contact neither required nor quite possible, and exit not freely available. Only the road ahead, and whatever fills the silence between you.

And yet, sometimes, something gets said that wouldn't get said anywhere else.

I was in the back of an Uber in Albuquerque when I found myself thinking about a Lyft I'd taken years earlier in Cleveland. I was 21 then. The driver was American; his father, American, was a petroleum engineer in Saudi Arabia. The driver recounted his experience growing up abroad, his education, his social life, but largely of his displacement and dissatisification of living back in the US. I've since forgotten his name and the exact appearnace of his face.

What I remember is how his eyebrows would furrow in the rearview mirrow. And his words, vividly: "Once an expatriate, always an expatriate."

I said nothing. I looked out the window. Cleveland passing in the way cities do when you're being driven through them, present and then gone, present and then gone.

Come near-present again, a few days thereafter, Albuquerque: a son desiring to visit a bed-ridden mother in the waning moments of her life. Atlanta: an newfound free man navigating the world after his sentencing.

Washington. Middleton. Nashville. Cleveland. Austin. Atlanta. Albuquerque. Among others.

Yet, among all of these instances I come back regularly to the words of that man, "once an expatriate, always an expatriate."

I have never once chosen a place for the sake of the place itself. That first ever flight, followed by education, then the smaller migrations of internship and opportunity. Each one by consequence, depositing me somewhere I had not selected and would not have thought to.

And yet each one gave me something. Be it a new rhythm or a different mode of life, they gave a set of asusmptions about how to be in the world that I could not have arrived at alone. For that, I am grateful.

But gratitude, I think, is not the same as having earned what you are grateful for.