Chronicles of a Danville Uni Student

There’s nothing that brings two people together quite like waking up at five am and hopping on a bus every morning before the sun has even started to crack the horizon. To make things even more interesting, said bus is the bus running between Danville and Champaign, which means that it is often filled with odd characters. This situation is where sophomore Tina Wayne and I find ourselves every morning. We landed in this situation because we used to be the only Uni students from Danville and thus ended up carpooling through the Danville-Champaign bus and rides from our family. As much as the daily forty-five minute rides suck, the two of us have developed a rare and super close relationship over the past three years.

There’s a reason why people don’t typically engage in conversation at six am after four hours of sleep. When you’re that tired you don’t care about censoring yourself; you feel perfectly comfortable talking about absolutely anything. I can say with a great deal of certainty that there’s not a single topic we haven’t breached, from things deemed too “weird” to be socially acceptable to talk about to topics seen as too “inappropriate” for casual conversation. This variety in conversation has definitely led to some rather unusual conversation threads and quotes, but being able to share and talk about so much has helped to cultivate an incredibly unique and comfortable bond.

Besides the lack of filter you find at the wee hours of the morning, simply being around someone so much tends to lead toward close friendship. We spend at least around two hours together every day between the collective hour and a half spent travelling and the half hour we spend at Siebel at seven am waiting for the school to open. That’s ten hours a week of just the two of us entertaining whatever obscure topic of conversation we choose that day. That’s a lot of bonding time. We rarely ever make plans to hang out outside of carpooling simply because we don’t need to. Travelling alone is enough to cultivate a strong and comfortable bond.

In the ten hours per week that we see each other, Tina and I have formed a friendship where we can say absolutely anything we want and feel completely free from judgment doing so. I wouldn’t qualify our bond as simply a best friendship because it’s completely different than that. I also wouldn’t call it a sister-like bond because we never fight or have disputes; instead I’d label it as somewhere in between the two. No matter the label, however, it’s pretty amazing that something as simple as carpooling has created a friendship that I’m sure will continue far beyond high school. As much as I hate waking up at the crack of dawn, I’m so grateful that it has cultivated such a great and long-lasting companionship.