Mistakes were made…

By Kirstin Hahn

Me and my mother and stepfather were planning to go on a trip to New York and I was very eager to go I could not wait to go and stay with my step sister and see her after so long without seeing her. We were very close and loved hanging out and spending time together.

So I was begging my mom to let me go a week early so I can spend two weeks with her instead of just one. There was so much stuff to get ready and if I was leaving early I only had two days to get ready and find people to cover my shifts at work. I was very stressed out but very excited for the trip and to see her. There were a lot of things I had to do before I left and could not forget a charger because I could not go with a dead phone. My mom still didn’t say yes so I was still begging her everyday and would not give up. I could not believe that she didn’t trust me enough to be alone when she had many times before.  My step sister was even calling her and her dad and begging both of them to let me come because we were on the same page knowing that we wanted to spend more time together than we were supposed to have. We were getting somewhere with them because they were thinking about it but we still didn’t have a yes.

we were both set in stone that I could get down there alone and we could find our way around Brooklyn ourselves and that we didn’t need adults. She was texting me constantly and was a very happy person but was more happy when were talking about seeing each other. We finally got yes out of them and we were so excited. All we could do is talk about it and talk about everything we were going to do and all of our plans. We were beyond ourselves. So we booked the bus ride where there were crazy amounts of people and had no space to myself but I was on my way and that all that mattered to me in the moment!! I was so excited when I got down there.

When I got to New York there were so many people everywhere the streets we absolutely packed because it was rush hour and there were cars beeping everywhere but all I cared about was seeing my sister. She’s a lot taller than me so I could see her over the crowd of people and knew her voice like the back of my hand. She picked me up at the bus station and when we saw each other we just didn’t say anything we only hugged and shed a few tears. we had convinced her aunt that we would take the bus and explore New York we thought that it was the best idea but we were very wrong. We got on the bus to go to time square we had to go to another one and we got so lost. We had no clue where to go and we for sure lost. We were scared and both of our phones were dead so we couldn’t use them for directions. I keep asking her “does anything look familiar” and then I would hear her say the one thing I didn’t want to hear “not at all”. We were scared out of our minds and we kept trying to ask people which bus we should take and where we could go to get to it and no one would help us or even give us the time of day to answer and when they did they either didn’t know or just making a guess and was not correct. When we finally got someone that helped we got on the bus, they said and if brought us to the total wrong place and then we were even more lost and our metro cards had no money on them so we had to find a store that we could reload them with so we were walking around looking like lost puppies. We weren’t puppies but we for sure were lost.

After this incident we definitely changed the way we thought a lot, we didn’t think we could do everything on our own and that we were invincible, we paid attention to the little things more like if our phones could make it the whole trip and made sure we had chargers if they couldn’t. that day definitely changed us for the better.  We were not dumb people at all but we were just making dumb decisions for some reason. This was the biggest mistake we have ever made because we regretted not just listening and waiting for our parents. We wanted to act grown when we were not and we figured that out very fast

Photo by Justin in SD on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA