The lines are what get me. Somebody came out here with a machine and painted hundreds of little rectangles on the asphalt, all the same width, and then everyone just agreed to honor them. Nobody enforces it, not really. A person could park sideways across three of them and the worst that happens is a note under the wiper.
But they don't. They pull in slow, they straighten up, they leave the courtesy of a door's width for the next car. Total strangers, cooperating in a system nobody voted on.
I stand here between a minivan and a pickup, groceries getting warm in the cart, and I think about how thin the air is that we do all this in. From up there the whole atmosphere is a blue line no thicker than the skin on an apple, and under it, this: a flat field of tar in the middle of nowhere in particular, where people who will never speak to each other have quietly arranged themselves into rows so everyone can get home.
You don't see parking lots from orbit. You don't see anything human at all, no cities at night on the day side, no roads, no borders, nothing. Just weather and water and the curve of it. All of this, the lines and the courtesy and the warm milk, is happening at a scale too small to register from the only place I ever really saw it whole.
A woman two spaces down is loading a car seat, checking the buckle twice, tugging it to be sure. Nobody told her the air was thin.
She just wants the strap tight before she pulls out into all that empty road.