Maybe here you miss driving. The independence, the significance of the closed bubble of individuality that means your music, your optimal temperature, your conversation. Everything tailored. Long night drives with your own thoughts, uninterrupted, sleek black roads of silence. Or music - and with the car racing along, your inertia is always the perfect accompaniment.

But here nothing is your own, really. Space, sound, scent - you're at the whim of everyone and everything else. You laugh to yourself when you realize halfway home the reason your commute home has tantalizingly - agonizingly - smelled like warm, greasy, cheesy, pizza is because the guy two bikes ahead is dangling double boxes in his right hand and biking with his left. And unless you pass him, you and everyone else behind him are left to bike, forcibly enveloped, in a smell so good your mouth waters in the night air, until by some grace of god he turns onto a side street.

And of course, the other feelings: tension, aggression. Bikes have bells and cars have horns, so that type of 'polite gesture sometimes veering towards over-abused annoyance' is the same. But other things seem slightly different. Beefs are expressed through direct verbal comments, often when riding right past someone. I think very rarely, if ever, do I see people just start screaming and causing a scene. Instead, they'll bike by the person and express their discontentment (perhaps a sharp word or two) but it isn't a volume intended for the world to hear. Or, people get into really intense staring contests.

Once I witnessed two men on bikes almost collide into each other. Everything seemed to melt into slow-motion as they both turned at the same time, locked eyes with each other, and didn't let go. It was a cold Scandi-glare at its finest. No words or sounds were made.

Or the time I saw a biker gracefully glide around a truck going through a red, in a cinematic fashion. My heart leapt as he narrowly avoided a collision, but instead sailed in a beautiful 180 degree arc around the front of the truck, with one perfectly poised middle finger raised to the sky.

It's real. You're in the same environment, interactions are closer. You're not behind a full ton of metal. Tempers may flare, but there's no violence. When I think about space I think about the times that people get angry in the safety of their cars, and the stages of escalation - honking horns, screaming, cussing, rolling down the window, opening the car door, getting out of the car, getting in someone's face (and then, rarely but regrettably, the road rage shootings) and I laugh because when you've gotten in someone's face you've really crossed the line, but that's sort of the personal-space line you begin with on a bike because you're so damn close to everyone that in the summer you better hook your purse around your handlebars because the guy next to you in traffic could easily reach over and grab your wallet.