Oh, Chicago.
It’s been eight full years since my last visit to the Windy City (outside of one of the worst airport stopovers in modern history). The city of my almost absolutely ideal weather (could stand to be a little drier in the summer, but otherwise perfect) and almost absolutely horrible everything else. Past visits to Chicago have been almost universally bad, marked by high turmoil and tension, argument, and almost unending apprehension. Something about the length of time spent seems to correspond to the extent of the badness, or at least the fallout. The one decent visit was in late ’97, where my Dad and I flew to a debate tournament in Florida via Chicago, with a few hour layover. We didn’t really have time to check out either of the city’s colleges I’d applied to and they put massive amounts of milk in my coffee without asking and it was bitterly cold and we were both a little grumpy toward the end. But nobody got hurt.
And that was by far the best visit. Maybe it’s no wonder that I didn’t give much consideration to either of those colleges when I’d gotten in.
But still to come was the last visit, eight years ago and change, which still stands out as one of the worst trips of all-time. It didn’t help that I’d been anticipating the trip with a wildly inexplicable sense of foreboding that proved as prophetic (though not as seriously so) as I’d feared. I was going into a Model UN conference that I’d been guilted into attending, nearing complete exhaustion with the politics and format of collegiate Model UN. This trip, which proved to be my last lifetime MUN conference, cemented my feelings while just seeming to waste my time. From the 20th day of Introspection ever: “Never been so bored in a MUN committee in my life. That’s 6 years of effort there.”
The trip was not without upside. Chicago is not only a place of bad feeling for me, but of incredibly intense feeling. The severity of emotional spurring gives it a vague potential that I would be more inclined to pursue if the downside tendencies of my state in the city didn’t just scare me. I spent the first night of the trip wandering around the city by myself, lost in reverie that culminated in me literally yelling at myself as March was about to cross over into April…
Sometimes I think I should walk around with a tape recorder. Walking back from that convenience store, I swear I figured everything out. Well, not everything, but more than I’ve had a handle on for a long time. Talking out loud works so much better, especially in cold night air. If I could maintain that focus for days on end, life would almost feel easy. Instead, I end up blinding myself to clarity & getting crowded by my frustrations. I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve, I wear it on my tongue. & I don’t consider that a problem, if only I could express myself as well to others as I can to myself. Seems like they’d be easier to convince anyway.
After the conference concluded, there were then plane delays trying to get out of the city and it felt like that place just had me in its clutches. Note to self: Plane delays where one has incredibly impatience and anxiety about getting out in time are usually a warning sign. Proceed with caution. Or, as I told myself at the time (day 21 of Introspection): “I’ve got to learn to start trusting my instincts. I might hate my intuition, but it’s always right.”
In my memory, I think I’d folded the two days that followed my return into nothing, or transplanted them as being prior to the trip. But that’s only how it seemed in retrospect, because the trip was so awful and everything crashed to pieces 48 hours after my return. But those were a pivotal 48 hours. A very good 48 hours. Until Ben Brandzel caught me reveling in the downstairs portion of the Usdan cafeteria and uttered the worst joke I’ve ever heard in my life:
“So, has she told you about her book yet?”
Though I felt like he’d just winded me with a sucker punch, I refused to be fazed at the time. In less than 36 hours, though, it was all over. With less warning but as much seeming foreknowledge, I had been felled by this comment just as Lisha’s “Doomsday” Prophecy of ’93 had unwittingly unraveled that situation. Of course the comment had nothing to do with anything, but it sure made it feel like the events had more to do with fate than anything I could control.
I went into freefall. A good bit of this is discussed in my recent post about April. There’s no need to hash out more details and I really should wrap this up anyway. In the swirl of retrospect, the trip and everything that followed were inextricably bound with each other and a sense of powerful, living destiny.
Was there destiny? I don’t really believe in destiny, but it’s hard to argue with what transpired. The wake of the events of March and April 2000 convinced me to start “The Streak” and I never missed an APDA debate weekend thereafter. I decided that I might as well continue with my resolution at the advent of the millennium that I would devote myself to the one thing that was going well in college. The relationship that ended in such a crushing fashion turned out to feel more and more like a dodged bullet than a sincere loss. All of these things led directly to fuel everything that happened in the next two years: staying at Brandeis, debate success, and Emily.
This time around, I don’t feel any sense of foreboding at all. It’s almost uncanny how calm I feel despite the history, despite it being April. Another rejection of destiny, perhaps, or just an openness to change. It’s certain that even the slightest inkling of bad feeling would get blown up in my perception given the context, so it’s really all good. I can’t wait to see Fish, meet his new girlfriend and other friends, see Wrigley, give this city a fourth or fifth or sixth chance.
Forty years after “something very extraordinary died there, which was America,” I’ll be heading back toward the city named for wild leeks once again. My baseball streak is at 3 games, after a beautiful complete game by Felix Hernandez last night. I have a busy day at work, made somewhat more challenging by a mild migraine. I’m getting on a vessel of one of the plane companies that has still managed to stay solvent. Life is mixed, but life is good.
We’ve come too far to leave it all behind.
