Search This Blog

Tuesday 23 September 2014

There's a first time for everything

I have on occasion considered getting off transit to get away from someone, but I'd never actually done it until today.

I saw a single open seat on the bus when I got on, so I sat down. The woman next to me seemed completely absorbed in her phone. Perfect. When she finally looked up it was to ask if we were at street X; I was confused at first, but then I realized we were in fact more than 100 blocks north of X. That should have been my first clue.

A few more minutes pass and she decides she gonna start talking to me. I try to listen at first to be polite. She's complaining about a transit fine because she missed her stop and rode to the end of the line and stayed on the bus when it turned around so she didn't reswipe her pass. I'm smiling and nodding, not actually saying more than 2 words at a time; haven't even taken out my headphones. She continues to tell me that she was going to her boyfriend's house, but she missed the stop because she was "messed up". Uh oh, red flag number 2.

Then it gets weird. She starts talking like she knows me.
Her: "you're married right?"
Me: "uh, no" (super confused because I'm not even wearing my decoy ring)
Her: "but you have a baby right?"
Me: "uh...no..."
She goes on to explain that I look like another girl with a baby that she met on the bus and that girl is pregnant, but I don't look pregnant. This naturally led into a story about a dude who thought she was pregnant once because she was wearing a big hoody with stuff in the pockets. She then continues her rant about guys by explaining she has a guy friend who really wants to sleep with her, which is messed up because she has a boyfriend and she's no cheater. Of course, this is still awkward, but I thought we established that she doesn't actually know me.

No such luck.
Her: "so how long have you been at Y?"
Me (having no idea what Y is, but not wanting to be forthcoming with personal info to a stranger on the bus): "a little while"
Her: "like a few years?"
Me: "oh not that long?"
Her: "I've been there about 8 years. So you know there's this white girl there and she's with this Puerto Rican guy. You know them right?"
Me (still with headphones in, music on and not really making eye contact): "uh, no"
Her: "oh really, you don't know them? Well they have a baby and it's like the cutest baby..."
Me: "oh yeah..."
At this point it's pretty clear there is no stopping her, nor is there any making sense of what is coming out of her clearly drug-addled brain. So at the next stop, I'm out.
Me: "well, this is my stop" (totally not my stop, not even within reasonable walking distance to my stop)
Her: "okay, thanks for listening to my..."
I have no idea how that sentence ended; I just smiled and nodded as I hauled ass off that bus.

No comments:

Post a Comment