Via Chicago
When the El came for me at Clark and Lake I stood, as I used to, on the danger zone, and closed my eyes as the thundering train few past. The rush of air sends my hair dancing about my face and I feel oddly weightless for a moment. Weightless, floating, powerless against the motion but powerful and wrapped in sound. It’s a gorgeous feeling. I used to do that every day. I opened my eyes and wasn’t in the right place. For a fraction of a second I wondered why everything had changed.
There is a magic that haunts winding streets of grids and lights, a force that whirrs and shivers and breathes. The siren song of progress and life, pure life, so strong and vital it runs uncaring and bullish towards the future, leaving this monstrous modern world in its wake. Its relentless attraction is so great and consuming that I’ll never fully understand it and consequently, never be able to explain it. Maybe it’s that forward motion propels me farther from my lackluster past. Maybe it’s that the promise of my future feels like something between a reward and a pardon. Maybe if the love of my life were a place and not a person, I could loosen my grip a little bit.
Maybe I’m never more a mystery than when no one knows my name.
Walking through a city with a lot on my mind is effortless and beautiful; adrift in a sea of others I can live inside my head and sort myself out. All my mumbled and unwritten words come together like an epic list of simple thoughts so bright and clear and true. And concrete. A mass of absolute declaratives. And I walk out from this other world returning with this newfound truth and possibility, bravery to conquer galaxies of frailty and love. The secrets only you and I may share, Chicago, lined up with Manhattan’s volumes, stories woven in cacophonous silence of the cities in my head.
I’m sorry.
I love you.
I’m sorry I love you.
