For the Girl Who Missed the Bus
Words by Roman Umnas
8/26/25 ∙ 6:54 PM
I am on the 51B, and we just passed a girl standing on the opposite side of the street, visibly upset that the bus had just flown past her. Without a batting of its headlight lashes, without a pitiful sigh of exhaust.
She was dressed in a tightly knit grey sweater, one fuzzy and warm and not too itchy. A pair of flare leggings so long they seemed to ruffle an endless number of times atop the peek of deer-hide tan, which I assumed to be a classic Ugg Tasmin. A pop of that distinctive, GBO-yellow wristband wrapped around her wrist. But what she wore best in that moment, was the look of shock on her face that the bus did not stop.
All this to say, her disgruntled demeanor, upward flinging of her arms, and the fact that she was… well, on the wrong side of the road, led me to believe she wasn’t particularly well versed in the nuanced art of the Alameda-Contra Costa Transit system.
In the minutes that passed after we passed her by, I couldn’t help but smile, thinking that in our shared moments of existence, her fiery anger was being reshaped into some form of a timid embarrassment.
A sheepish glance left and right down College Ave, surveying whether passersbys had witnessed her making the rather silly mistake of expecting the bus to swerve into oncoming traffic, deflate its tires, and scoop her right up.
While surely nobody else saw her split second shrug of frustration, I did. And it stuck with me. As I traversed the streets of a place I had the privilege of calling home, after two years of living and growing and riding the bus that girl wished she was on, I could feel her confusion blossom into one of the most beautiful parts of being alive. She had learned something.
In simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, in missing the damn bus, maybe she realized college was not going to be as easy as she thought it would be.
Maybe she realized this walk down College Ave would bring her peace like no other sidewalk before.
Maybe she was just British.
Regardless of who she was, where she was going, and if she ever got there (cross your fingers), I felt so grounded, sitting next to my groceries on that green plastic seat, knowing that she had just learned something new. She had become more human. And I had become more human, with the faith that moments like these were happening all around me.
I thought back to my primordial bus blunder my freshman year. I, ironically enough, got on the bus on the wrong side of the road. I passed through Elmwood for the very first time, then Rockridge, wondering when I would ever make it to the RSF. The small realization that I would never make it there, that I made a mistake, led to a snowball effect of my own naivety, disorientation, and aimlessness. I realized how new this place was, and how little I really know, and how alone I really was.
I snapped out of my flashback to a new realization, that I, being pushed by the golden chariot that was the 51B, was once in her fur-lined shoes. And just like me, she’ll grow, and change, and have the best and worst times of her life, and undoubtedly, she’ll make it onto the bus, and sit in the very seat I’m sitting in right now.
The bus just came to a halt at my stop, despite my failure to pull the cord. I was too busy thinking about how excited I was for this stranger, for the girl who missed the bus. I picked up my groceries, thanked the driver (and the universe), and hopped off.
