I’m sixteen drowning in the roar of the L train and a hotel room with a wallpaper map. I’m in tweed and mixed words and also biting into my first croissant. I’m in an urban wasteland but also on the 3rd floor, having used the old type of elevator with the accordion doors- sick from deep dish pizza and foreign germs. I’m understanding, preemptively, what it means to be in love.
I’m also younger and older and every age in between, in the massive mall of America, thinking about being 25 with my lover going in and out of stores with bursting paper bags and no credit card debt. Maybe we’ll get Chinese food after, or go to Ikea. I’m a child and this is my idea of being in love. It turns out to be the correct idea. I’m 7 and 10 and 14 and 17 and I’m understanding, preemptively, what it means to be in love. To be in love is to share, is to experience a form of togetherness that is impenetrable by the cashier or the screaming toddler outside. It is to walk past windows together and laugh. I’m under the harsh lights of the dressing room understanding more than I ever will ever again.
Why is Chicago the motive I can never outrun? Well yes. It’s because it’s the motif of me. The muse that turned into Gotham city, but also the sprawl of the heartsick and lost. Windy city blowing bits and pieces around. Again, I’m younger in a wet leather skirt around lots of people who hate each other, and all I’m thinking about is that someday, I want to go to the breakfast place we’re currently sitting at, and I want to share something with the person I’m in love with.
Now my life is post-popular electro beats and a cast on my ring finger. A fat knee scab and my last pack. My life is the entire summer blending into one bright red kool-aid spill. It’s the last pair of shorts I saw him in. I understood the rigor and the weightless pressure of love too early, before I had the cognitions required to recognize it. The moment has passed and Chicago is everything it has ever been and everything it will ever be. I can bookend it now. Before and after being in love, I go to Chicago, and I mourn.
We’re side by side on bikes and it’s pouring. We are quiet, he’s protected in a rain jacket and I’m drenched. Hair plastered everywhere. Not everything has to mean something else. It’s too late now, is all I know for sure.
I think this is probably what writing is. In a metapractice way it is meant to transport people into your own experience. The success of this varies. In a personal way it is the only way, now, that I can transport him into all the experiences I wanted us to have together before I even met him. All of the heavy weightlessness that buried itself in the chest of my teenage self, so full I was bursting with something completely unnamable. I knew him before I knew him. And now I know I knew him too late. I’m twenty one understanding posthumously what it means to be in love. A complete understanding of the human experience is unfortunately that the only notions we have of anything meaningful are built after the fact.
I’m going to go back to Chicago and all of my favorite corners and songs, the Ethiopian restaurant on 6th, the L train, the back shelf of the bookstore. My mother and moussakka. I will miss him every second of every day, and I’ll look deep into every sky, in every airport bathroom, in the bottom of every boiling pot, and I’ll find nothing except for that weightless pressure. That assurance of something that was real, before and after. Nothing exists in between.