Public transportation gives me extreme anxiety. But when I had no car, I had to do what I had to do to get where I needed to go. In this case, I was lucky to have my best friend Hali struggling right along with me. Hali is the Raven Symone to my Disney Channel. She makes me better, and we are inseparable. However, neither of us frequented RTA. 

I’d convinced Hali to do a volunteer stint with me for some type of day of service that my campus job wanted people to go to. I chose the location where the fewest people I knew would go: the Westbank. My university was located Uptown. These two areas are not near each other. 

The day before the event, I found out from Google Maps that it would be an hour and 28 minute bus ride where we changed buses once and walked half a mile ourselves. Hali was less than thrilled, but she got up at morning’s butt crack with me and we did the damn thang. 

The problems arose on the way back. We realized the bus we needed to go back Uptown was at a different stop than the one that got us to the Westbank. And that stop was a mile away. Already tired from picking up trash for hours, we walked through a long stretch of neighborhood to a lonely, dilapidated wooden bench which, according to my dying phone, was our bus stop.

We sat. We waited. 20 minutes passed. A bus neared us, passed up our spot and stopped at another bench slightly down the street. Was it ours? Neither of us could see the number, and we really didn’t want to get on the wrong bus. We let it go by. 

By now an hour had passed. We were tired and hungry. Another bus approached, this one definitely ours. But, it passed us again and stopped down the street. Both of us yelled, “wait,” hella confused as to why it didn’t stop for us. The bus didn’t wait.

Not soon after we sat back down on the bench, defeated and sure we would die there, a Black woman yelled at us from outside of her house, “Y’all better get your asses down to that bus stop if you tryna catch a bus!”

We had no idea how long she’d been watching us sit on a bench that was NOT a bus stop, but apparently, it had been long enough.

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