Bus Stop Chronicles

“Tell me this, how come the past tense is always longer?”

-Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

An excerpt from my notes app, dated July 24th, 2025:

My friend Grace, blue and white dress shirt with square pattern, maroon nails, chunky silver jewelry, bob cut with bangs, black shorts, bright yellow Shakespeare & Co. bag. Woman with pastel pink hair, turquoise headband, red Jordans, tie dye skirt, white top, black fanny pack, playing candy crush. Woman with white jeans shorts and grey shirt, rushed off the bus saying, “thank you so much!” Lady with broken leg, tattered book bag, basketball shorts, shirt with stars, apologized twice for asking woman with pastel pink hair to move. Man with piggish nose, blue and white striped shirt, greying hair, staring wistfully out of the window, crimson bag.

Somewhere in between growing up and growing old, I knew I would have to leave. Trading the view of snow capped mountains from my backyard in Santiago for the flattened suburbs of Miami at seven dawned the realization that life will never be quite as static as I’d like it to be. And while my world was uprooted at an age too early for it to be truly devastating, I still think every now and then about the friends I had. The one who was good at skateboarding, the one whose mother made phenomenal pancakes.

Turning eighteen means being constantly reminded of the exasperating countdown to the rest of your life. My friends’ laughter now warps at the edges, crimping beneath a quiet understanding that time is chipping away at our once seemingly endless childhoods. I find myself wondering more and more if the moments spent lounging at corrugated blue tables, swinging on hammocks, and stifling laughter in the school library will find me in twenty years time, while I’m filing taxes or tucking children into bed.

“I wish I had photographic memory,” I told my mother once after flunking a math test (said flunking was in part due to my inability to recall certain equations). “I think you’d hate that,” my mother said curtly. “But then I could remember everything,” I groaned, scraping the tip of my pencil over the equations I had forgotten. “Exactly,” she extended her hand, pressing her palm against my right temple. “Don’t you think we all have a hard enough time dealing with the things we do remember?” I tapped my pencil against my notebook, signifying defeat. She was right, as mothers often are.

I made the mistake of watching The Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind a couple weeks after my first breakup. “Why are you crying?!” My mother exclaimed as she burst into my room. I turned to her, snot dribbling down my chin while I sobbed; Joel was in the midst of telling Clementine that he wished he’d stayed. She gave me a wry smile, shaking her head before walking out of my room. After I finished the movie, she came back inside. I was huddled underneath the covers, but felt a dip as she sat down at the foot of my bed. “Tu eres tan sentimental¹,” she sighed. “No I’m not,” I said in between sniffles. She giggled slightly, and I peeked my head out from under the covers. “Sometimes, I wish I could feel things as deeply as you do,” she said. “Why?” I squinted to see her through puffy eyelids. A weary expression wrung her face. “It means you have a big heart,” she said, before walking back out of my room.

I am getting a little better at forgetting, and a little worse at letting go. The other day, a friend of mine called me up at 8 p.m. on a Tuesday night. “Can we drive down to Key Biscayne²?” she asked. If it had been any other person, my mother wouldn’t have allowed for such a spontaneous trip, but since this friend had recently gone through a particularly calamitous breakup, she relented. We screamed Hot N Cold as we shot down Rickenbacker Causeway³, making our way to a beach that could only be accessed after spending five minutes fiddling with the lock of a gate. We set up some blankets and rotated through a variety of staple teenage topics: the future, school, food, romantic enterprises.

“I wish I could forget everything about him,” my friend had said while we were staring up into the starless, cloudy night. I slowly lifted my legs into the air, consequently dragging sand all over myself. My friend laughed, and even though the grains were irritating me, I laughed with her. “I don’t think you really wish that,” I said, turning to look at her. It was now 10 p.m., and I could barely make out her face in the darkness. She was still looking up into the sky. “I think you’re right,” she said. I got up from my blanket and kicked my shoes off before waddling into the water to wash the sand off my legs. “Wanna get something to eat?” she asked, her voice nearly drowned out by the murmuring waves. I nodded hastily, and we packed up the blankets before driving back up the Causeway, reaching Brickell City Centre⁴ at around 11.

“Do you think people in North Dakota ever get bored?” she said as we rode an escalator up through the mall. My eyes glazed over the mall’s jutting architecture, escalators criss crossing like neatly placed ribbons. “What the hell is there to do in North Dakota?” I returned. We stepped off the escalator at the top level of the mall, and meandered to an open platform overlooking a busy intersection. “Do you think they ever get sad that they don’t have stuff like this?” she waved an arm at the skyscrapers littered around. “I think they’re happy with the stuff they do have,” I shrugged. “Like what,” she snorted. “Mountains, for one.”

“We don’t even have hills here,” she laughed. I smiled, and watched the cars stroll through the intersection, a graceful dance of turns and yields. We concluded our adventure by driving through the rest of downtown, scraping the edge of Bayside⁵, then passing through Wynwood⁶ to reach the highway. As we drove down the throat of the Expressway, my friend rolled down the windows of her Volvo and began blasting DtMF. “Ojalá que los míos nunca se muden!⁷” I shouted as we passed Miami International Airport, the same airport that had given me my first taste of what it really means to leave earlier in July when I boarded my first solo flight to Iowa city for a residential writing program. The roaring wind whipped at my hair, swallowing my words and perhaps my wish for that moment to last just a second longer.

Towards the end of my two week getaway in Iowa, I spent an evening navigating Iowa City’s dysfunctional public transportation system with my friend Grace in an attempt to dine at a Culver’s.⁸ While on the first of two buses we would miss, I was filled with the sudden urge to capture the moment at hand. A bus filled with people I will likely never seen again (with the exception of Grace, hopefully), all heading in different directions. While Grace and I devised a plan on how to reach Culver’s after being stranded on the outskirts of a cornfield, I briefly thought about the people on the bus, and whether or not they had already reached their destinations. Whether or not they were where they wanted to be, both literally and figuratively.

While we did eventually succeed in our mission, I got more than just a taste of perfectly crispy fries and a tender burger that day. I understood then that my life was quickly unfolding, taking me places far beyond my copacetic neighborhood, beyond the sunny beaches and bustling roads of a city eternally under construction.

During DtMF’s outro, I turned to look at my friend. Quiet tears streamed down her face. For a moment, I thought back to the ending scene in Ladybird, when Christine is driving back through Sacramento; Jon Brion’s wistful score playing as shots of her driving and of the city itself alternate between piano notes. Later, I recounted this “Ladybird moment” to another friend of mine, who had chuckled, saying, “My whole life has been a Ladybird moment.” I like to think that moments like these perfectly encapsulate what being a teenager feels like. The awkward reality of being stuck at an age that feels both infinite and ephemeral.

My friend dropped me off at my house a little past midnight. While walking across the driveway to the front door, she paused. “You can see the stars more clearly from here than from the beach,” she said, pointing upwards towards the sky. I stood next to her, craning my neck. “There’s the Little Dipper,” the tip of her index finger grazed a bulb of light, tracing lines in between the dots.

I know I will leave someday. Whether it be a couple hundred miles away, or a couple thousand, my heart fidgets too often to stay resigned to a place I’ve always known. But I also know that I will miss this place, these people, this moment. A web of memories, caught in palm tree leaves, glistening off the water’s reflection at an overcrowded beach. Echoing off of highways, blown away by the spinning of a plane engine.

Although I hope I won’t miss this place the same way Ladybird missed Sacramento after moving to New York, I know that I will anyway. It’s horrid humidity, it’s beautiful springs. It’s dirty parking lots, it’s brilliant sunsets. A place I will remain forever indebted to for the people it’s placed in my path; for the serendipity that so graciously overflows from what was once nothing but marshland.

And when I look towards the night sky from wherever I am, I know the stars will always shine a little brighter from home.

Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.

1. “You are so sentimental.”

2. An island at the mouth of downtown Miami.

3. The bridge connecting downtown to Key Biscayne.

4. A mall in Miami’s financial district; the beating heart of downtown

5. Downtown’s waterfront decorated with stores.

6. Miami’s art district; the wall of every building in this neighborhood is painted or graffitied in some way.

7. “I hope my family/people never move.”

8. A famous midwestern fast-food chain; does not exist in the realm of Miami.