To be fair, there was also Bolt Bus, Amtrak, and NJ transit + Septa. Living on the East Coast means there’s a plethora of transportation methods between all the major cities. None of which, are necessarily all that pleasant, but they will get you where you want eventually (read: hours of delays, cancelled routes, maintenance-prone, or very roundabout stops in sketch middle of nowhere). I recently took a Megabus from New York to Boston, and I probably hadn’t been on a bus in several years. It’s funny how memories do get triggered, as several very specific snapshots that relate to these blue and yellow double decker buses floated through my mind the entire 4-hours.
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It might have been the last time I was at a megabus stop, where I think I actually missed the bus [to D.C?] so stood around the metal fences for a while outside the Jatvis center, waiting for the next bus. I called my boyfriend and it was one of those times we had an impressionable conversation. We spoke about what it means to have an inner and outer circle relationship, how we have the same people in our inner circle (each other, family, close friends) and outer circles (acquaintances, colleagues), yet our treatment of them are completely opposite. It’s like we’re in the wrong circles for each other.
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Catching my reflection in the window store fronts, among the piles of dirty snow, I looked every bit the student. I was wearing a long, silver down jacket, yellow ski gloves, black snow shoes and carried a light blue backpack with an orange duffel bag slung on my shoulder. Thought to myself, I should really work on better outfits that don’t stand out so awkwardly with unmatching colors, like a neon sign for “please mug me,” as I trudged through the street outside Penn Station…
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We went to visit my brother in New York and your sister in Boston during Fall Break, and we must have taken the bus. I remember we sat in the lower level. There are small snippets of memories of Rose’s really big, but strangely shaped dorm, where there were lots of random cardboard boxes that served as tables. It was surprisingly messy for 3 girls. Brushing our teeth in the double sink bathroom upstairs. Playing cards in the dimly lit ground area, where you had a crush on the Spanish David.
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The notoriously sketchy alleyway perpendicular to 30th street Penn Station. With the metal fences on one side lining the abandoned cars lot and the weirdly high billboard or old elevated train track sign painted blue with gold Drexel letters. The gravel along that road (there was no pavement) with the sole street light at the intersection next to the auto shop. Waiting many a times for the delayed buses, usually in the winter, when it was freezing cold.
Later on, getting picked up in your blue Hyundai, Elantra. Remember how we also named the fridge Harold and your laptop Lazarus? It was a quick drive to the old townhouse on Osage, the closest to West Philly / as dangerous as you’d risk.
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There is a dingy Avis at the corner, where I rented a car for us to drive to Cornell and Niagara Falls. That was before we had iPhones so relied on physical maps for the 6–8 hour drive [or maybe I borrowed a GPS]. The car was in this sketch “gated” area outside the train station. I realize by now that I’ve used “sketch” too many times to describe most of my memories of 30th Street Station.
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The times I would rise up on the escalators from the underground train tracks at 30th Street. Ever since you told me that this station was often a film spot for Bollywood movies pretending it was Grand Central because this was much cheaper to book out, I always looked around in this moment trying to admire the grandness… before transferring to the ancient Septa trains with coin tokens for another journey out to Malvern/Thorndale.
Every way of going between New York and Philly, I had tried over the years. Whether by bus, which sometimes stopped at Cherry Hill, or by train so you can pick me up in Trenton or Philly, or by transferring 3 times to increasingly dilapidated transit methods, it was a journey worth taking so we can have another fun time together.
