To my dismay, the Michigan Flyer upped their prices this year. I think I’ve spent at least $300 on bus tickets within the past two years alone, but, truthfully, I’m not too upset about it. There’s something about this $16 (previously $15) bus ride between East Lansing and Ann Arbor that turns strangers into storytellers, rides into confessionals and in-betweens into chapters that narrate the various lives I’ve lived. Or, perhaps, I eavesdrop more than I care to admit.
I would like to say this eavesdropping isn’t intentional, but it is: the stories of old couples, new graduates, the mid-distance college relationships traveling weekends to see one another — I’ve always been enraptured by the unspoken complexities of these passing moments. The quiet realization that every person on this bus has a life as intricate and full as my own. And only within this finite moment, for this brief stretch of highway, will our stories intertwine.
Sometimes I wonder, just as I think about them, if someone has wondered about me.
I first took the Michigan Flyer two years ago to visit my friends at Michigan State University, which I previously attended. I arrived 15 minutes early, just as the ticket had told me, only for the bus to arrive in Ann Arbor 20 minutes late. I didn’t know it at the time, but that ride became the first page in a year-long chapter of finding myself. I had just transferred, and while the idea of a new beginning was romantic in theory, I was immediately greeted with the reality: Connections are hard and connections take time.
My semester began to blur into a cycle of countdowns to weekend trips, the tethers between the loneliness I knew and the warmth I chased. This ritual of departures and arrivals became a desperate escape from this new sense of alienation and yearning for what once was. I missed the sense of community, the people I had grown to love and, most of all, the identity that I had created from the ground up in my first year of university — free from familial expectations and the confining four walls of my childhood bedroom.
Thankfully, I made new friends at the University of Michigan, and eventually, these journeys began to change. They became an active choice — not to return to what I had nor who I was previously, but to reminisce, reconnect and remember. It wasn’t just the excitement of seeing old connections that pulled me forwards, but the growing ache to be near someone — a partner — whose presence had begun to mean something more. The kind of more that makes time pass too quickly, and that makes the 65 miles that stretch between East Lansing and Ann Arbor feel longer than it truly is. Somewhere along the way, these bus rides had shifted from an obligatory means of fleeing loneliness to a voluntary pursuit of love — to old friends, to new selves and to the one that I know will stay by my side for a million lifetimes.
I’ve come to think that the Michigan Flyer has become a kind of marker in my life — a transitory, neutral space between the people I love, places I’ve seen, lives I’ve led. To put it simply, this bus has seen everything: my (many) public breakdowns, tearful goodbyes, eager hellos. It’s seen me fall in love. It’s seen me leave parts of my heart behind in every city I’ve passed through. It’s seen me become someone softer, wiser, steadier.
I’d like to believe that I’ve grown within this space. Each trip, I return as a slightly different version of myself: a little more tired, a little more certain, a little more found. The rhythm of the Flyer’s wheels on I-95 has accompanied so many transitions that it has begun to move me in more ways than one — not merely through these cities, but through grief and hope, through solitude and love, through all the quiet thresholds of my becoming. The crossroads between who I was, who I am and who I will be. An ode to all the stories I will carry with me, and all the ones I’ve yet to live.
Perhaps I’ll find another piece of myself next weekend. I know I will.
MiC Columnist Lia Du can be reached at yutongdu@umich.edu.
