Anaea Lay Anecdotes, Angry spluttering, Chicago

Public Safety

Last January I went to the CAPS meeting for the neighborhood immediately south of me. I live in Chicago, which is all about neighborhoods, but in this liminal space that’s on the border to several different official boundaries and claimed by or inserting itself into several unofficial ones. If somebody local asks me where I live and I answer with anything other than the nearest train stop, I’m giving away something about what I think of them and my relationship to the situation.

CAPS is the program the Chicago police have for community engagement. The city is divided into police districts, each district has a beat, and each beat, in theory, has its own CAPS staff and regular meeting. I went to one when I lived in Rogers Park, at the very north edge of the city, fully intending to be a good citizen who regularly attended. My memory of the meeting is that the Italian Beef I’d ordered from a to go joint while rushing over to the meeting was actually a French Dip, that the CAPS officer in charge of the meeting seemed very interested in being useful but also was at a bit of a loss about why he was there or what he should do, and that for being a very small crowd of senior citizens, I was learning entirely too much about other people’s vexations regarding noisy dogs. When the time for the next CAPS meeting rolled around, I had other plans.

My little sister and I are very close. When people comment on it as being notable or unusual, I tell them a story about something that happened shortly after my mother came home from the hospital with her. My grandparents had come to visit and help out and had stayed in my parents house with me while my parents were at the hospital. I was three and a half years old, and my grandfather handed me the infant that was my brand new sibling saying, “This is your baby sister. That makes you a big sister, which means you have to look out for her.”

What I heard was that she was mine. And that something being mine meant I was responsible for it. There are standards. Expectations. Years later, when circumstances called for it, I informed some of my baby sister’s peers about these facts. I understand you had and altercation with my sister, I said. You will henceforward understand that upsetting her means crossing me. Make better choices. There were no more altercations.

This is what it means when I say I love you. It means you’re mine. It means I’m responsible for you. I take my responsibilities seriously.

I love Chicago like it’s the salt in my blood.

The CAPS meeting in January, in Lake VIew, was very different from the one in Rogers Park I went to over a year before. For one, it was at a police station rather than a park. For another, it was packed. A long table ran along the front of the room and it had authority figures from all over. Lots of them CPD. Some of them CTA. My alderman was there, even though this wasn’t in his ward. Representatives of the alderman who was in charge of that ward were there. I showed up just a few minutes before the meeting was supposed to start (without a disappointing sandwich) and could barely get a seat because it was packed with people who’d turned out for the meeting. The back row had reporters with video cameras squeezed in. I took one look at the room, reflected on the differences between Rogers Park and Lake View, and shook my head. Even with the shift in location and demographics, the difference was too big. Too much a certain kind of difference. This was not a typical CAPS meeting.

Which is not to say it wasn’t normal.

There are some stats about CPD I come back to over and over and over again. Police misconduct cost $113 million in lawsuit settlements in 2018 alone. That was a banner year for expensive misconduct, but not all that unusual. To put those numbers in perspective, the city had a projected budgetary shortfall of $838 million that had to be closed in order to pass the 2020 budget. (Page 33) Misconduct settlements over the last ten years could very nearly, by themselves, have plugged that gap. That’s without accounting for ancillary expenses like lawyers, servicing overhead, and loss of economic growth resulting from having a police force that mistreats its citizens, having a reputation for same, and the mistreated citizens experiencing consequences of that misconduct. Also, since we don’t actually have cash on hand to make those payments and they exceed what’s budgeted for them, we’re borrowing money to do it. Which costs even more.

That’s not the whole picture, though. The police do more than frame, torture, and shoot people. If you’re white and get murdered, odds are almost 50:50 that the CPD will clear the case. If you’re black it’s closer to 1:5. (These numbers are an improvement from what they were before 2019.) All that for a measly $2.7 billion spent on public safety. (Same PDF as above, page 61 this time).

Public. Safety.

The CAPS meeting in Lake View that I just happened to wander into because I didn’t have other plans that evening and I do things like go to public meetings for fun was unusual because there was an uptick in crime at nearby train stations in December. Community members were angry and frightened. Public officials wanted to alleviate fears and make a show of doing something. People at the table of authority figures at the front talked a lot. People in the overflowing seating area got mics and got to talk a lot. One of the officials said something I really appreciated by pointing out that even with a few highly publicized incidents, public transit is safe. One of the community members very comfortably and frankly shared their feeling that, “I don’t care what you say about whether it’s safe. I don’t feel safe and it’s your job to make me feel safe.”

A mom who works as a nurse shared that she’s too worried about safety to let her children ride transit, so she’s ordering them rideshares all the time, which is expensive and she can’t really afford. When a man from a youth intervention program got up to say hey, we all know it’s kids coming over here because it’s where the money is and causing trouble, I could use some funding to do more of my work and prevent that from happening, this mom sneered at him and said something along the lines of, “Why should we diaper your kids?”

I started doing the math on the cost of diapers versus car share then kept the answer to myself because she wasn’t actually concerned about the best way to spend money. Also, the diapers were figurative.

Summer before last I was leaving from work in the Loop to meet friends for dinner along the blue line. That was not my normal commute, so I didn’t cotton on fast enough about train delays. I wound up trapped between stations in a sweltering train car. Then inching forward to a packed and stuffy platform with trainloads of people making their way up to the street. Service was suspended for an unknown amount of time due to an incident further along the tracks. The blue line runs diagonal across a rigidly gridded map. There is no equivalent alternative. All of the buses were overloaded with an influx of erstwhile train passengers and also it was rush hour so you didn’t want to be commuting on the streets anyway.

I walked something like two and a half miles in a crowd of similarly stranded train passengers, evening summer sun absolutely baking us, and periodically texting my friends with updates on how very late I was going to be. A trip I’d expected to take half an hour wound up closer to two hours. I don’t deal with heat well and I once got a sun burn in under eight minutes.

It was a mini natural disaster. A horde of people overwhelming sidewalks, the crowd pockmarked with people calling home with status updates or calling friends for a morale boost. Every once in a while an overladen bus would go by, not bothering to stop unless somebody wanted to get off because there was absolutely no chance of anybody else squeezing on.

When I got to dinner I collapsed at the table, chugged a glass of ice water, and cowered under an awning so the dregs of sunset couldn’t burn me any further. “Fun evening?” a friend asked.

I sighed, resigned to the truth. “Actually, kinda? I mean, it was terrible, but also, everybody was enduring it together and just plunking along. I feel like I bonded with five hundred strangers I’ll never have to see again.”

My friends exchanged knowing looks. “So, you’ll forgive Chicago for absolutely anything.”

“I think so. Yes.”

Getting home after dinner was a breeze.

Scared white people ask for cops. The Lake View CAPS meeting was packed to the brim with scared white people. They wanted cops. Cops on platforms. Cops on train cars. Cops lingering near turnstiles. These particular white people pay some of the highest property taxes in the city. CPD needs to make them feel safe.

I was somewhat annoyed when I got home.

I lived in Seattle for three years. Their one train line is absolutely lousy with police hanging around to make people feel safe, mostly by keeping homeless people off the platforms. They never made me feel safe. Instead they reminded me that the fare system is an enforced honor system, which means a city that prides itself for anarchist tendencies accepts raids by fare enforcement officers demanding proof of payment as a matter of course. That the city isn’t even pretending its transit system isn’t premised on antagonism with people who use it. “Why are there cops everywhere? This is Seattle. I don’t think I’ve seen cops around like this in New York or Boston, and you definitely don’t get it in Chicago.”

A week ago Friday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot unveiled a plan to bring safety to the Red Line. She was at the Roosevelt station when she did it, which is the southern end of downtown Chicago. Lightfoot is unusual for a Chicago Mayor in that she will ever say anything unkind about CPD. Last year she fired the police superintendent ahead of details going public about what would, ideally, be a fairly bizarre scandal but is, in context, tame. I’m personally fond of the incident where she, not realizing she was within range of an active mic, called a representative from the FOP a clown when he showed up to defend officers who helped cover up for the cop who murdered Laquan McDonald. “I’m sorry that I said it out loud,” is a feeling I, personally, can get behind pretty fervently here.

It wasn’t surprising, but it did sour fondness, when the safety plan was more cops.

Shortly after the distressing CAPS meeting for the beat south of me, the meeting for my beat came around. I went. It was in a meeting room at the library that was about a quarter the size of the one for the other meeting. My alderman was there, but he sat in the audience. The official CAPS liaison was there and she sat up front. Two beat officers were there, too, but they stood to the side, answering questions as needed but otherwise just hanging out.

Counting me and excluding the alderman, there were three people from the community. The meeting lasted fifteen minutes.

I also went to one of several community outreach sessions CPD was having around the city in February in order to get input about desired policy changes. They made a very big deal about this being about engaging with the community but it is, in fact, because CPD was placed under a consent decree as a consequence of not only murdering a teenager in the street, but covering it up and trying to protect the murderer. The session was actually pretty well run, even if little of it inspired confidence that it was more than show in response to reporting that despite the consent decree coming down from the Feds, CPD is mostly ignoring it.

There were topic specific breakout sessions where people could make suggestions for policy. I stalked the ones related to use of force and deadly force. There weren’t any about misconduct discipline. I had questions. What, exactly, are the current policies? When were they last overhauled? What have the demonstrable effects of those overhauls been in terms of incident rate? Did they trigger organizational cultural changes? Does policy even drive the organizational culture inside CPD? I mean, policy is great and all, but it’s just so much paper if it isn’t where behavior and norms originate.

This is a session for suggestions, not questions, the breakout facilitators urged. What do you want? Tell us that.

But I can’t know what policy to ask for without understanding the relationship between policy and conduct. What I want is different conduct. What I want is police who don’t walk into tense situations and escalate them, antagonize people, draw batons on children, shoot teenagers. And cost us a fortune for the privilege. What I want is that if I see the cops arrest somebody, to feel confident this was a reasonable response to the situation and the person in the back of the car, my fellow resident, isn’t going to disappear down a back channel. I want to feel like the police are who stands behind me when I tap somebody on the shoulder and say, “Excuse me, but I understand there was an altercation between you and my city. You will henceforward understand that harming it means crossing me. Make better choices.”

That is, instead of feeling like they’re the ones with a shoulder I need to tap.

When I was looking for a job ahead of moving back, I had a phone interview with a promising prospective employer. I explained that no, I couldn’t drop in for an in-person interview later that week, I was relocating from Seattle and wasn’t going to move until I had work lined up. How long have I been gone? Ten years, but I’ve had it with being away and, come hell or high water, I’m going back. “Why? Everybody here wants to leave.” I didn’t pursue that job any further.

Chicago is the third largest city in the country behind New York and LA. Frankly, LA cheats and shouldn’t count. It is the only major city where the population is shrinking instead of growing. It’s in a state that spent most of the ten years I was away failing to pass a budget of any sort, which meant loss of basic, expected funding on a slew of fronts. Most of the population loss is from the Black and Latinx populations because those are the ones who’ve had their schools shut down. Those are the ones getting harassed and shot by the police. When I hear a white person sneer and talk about how they want to leave Chicago, I like them less. When I hear somebody else say it, I find myself staring down an existential threat poised to choke my city to death.

The Red Line runs north to south down the eastern corridor of the city. It starts at the northern border. The lake eats away at the coastline of the city as it moves north, meaning the train is fairly near the shore at the northern end, and miles away by the southern end. It runs through the loop but doesn’t participate: it and the blue line are both underground while they’re downtown. If you ride all the way down, north to south, you can see the whole picture of the city. You’ll pass four major college campuses. Two baseball stadiums. Glance signs for the underground pedways that people working downtown use to avoid winter and weather as they move from municipal buildings to food courts and malls mostly for tourists and spit you out at parking garages and Millennium Park or City Hall or or or.

Further south you pass Chinatown. Later, the tracks nestle down between two sides of the Dan Ryan Expressway and the train blows past traffic backups with smug abandon. By then the cars have fewer passengers. The atmosphere changes. People seem to know each other more, at least recognize fellow commuters. Chat. Pass through doors from one car to another to avoid somebody sleeping along a row of seats, or get away from somebody blaring music or just to stretch their legs. The Red Line has the most frequent service of any of the trains, especially during rush hour. Trains don’t hang around at stations for people to get off and change cars. No need. Just go through the doors between cars. In winter you get a blast of cold air. In summer, humidity pours in thick and sticky. This is normal enough that I’m more likely to settle down with my bike near the passenger doors than block the end of the car.

When I was commuting down from Rogers Park to the Loop every day for work, if I missed the best train for getting in on time and wound up with second best, I’d get the Red Line train with the conductor who loved his job more than anyone I’ve ever met. “Good morning Chicago, and are you ready for your day?” He was a relentless pep talk from Morse to Lawrence, urging students to focus on their studies, encouraging workers to focus on their day, and assuring everyone that it was going to be a good day. I hate mornings and that much cheerfulness that early is torture. I loved him anyway. Because he was right, fundamentally. I was in Chicago, crammed in with a bunch of other Chicagoans, riding a train to go do things that make Chicago work, keep it here, give it life. Totally worth getting out of bed for.

A week ago Friday, hours after Mayor Lightfoot announced more police would be put on the Red Line to keep it safe, a man passed from one car to the next through the doors at the end. It was afternoon rush hour. The train was downtown. With the workers. And the tourists. Packed with people who want to feel safe.

Since the Red Line is underground downtown, that’s where you’ll get musicians setting up and busking. Sometimes it’s a guy with a sax and a speaker filling out smooth jazz covers. Sometimes it’s a guy with a guitar. Or a guy with a guitar and a partner doing vocals. Sometimes it’s a group of teenagers rapping over a prerecorded beat. I don’t care who it is or what they’re doing because it’s awesome absolutely every time. Those platforms are alive when they have people and performers. They’re thriving.

During rush hour a man passed from one car to another in violation of a safety ordinance that is never, ever followed. There were cops on the train.

Before it was over, he and the police were on the train platform at Grand (tourist central). They shot him. Twice.

Public safety.

What kind of standard is that? Where is the responsibility? Is CPD really too devoted to itself to love the city it’s supposed to guard? Am I really supposed to find that acceptable? To want more of it? To think it solves anything?

On my way home from a play Friday night, I got to the platform just as a northbound train was leaving. I didn’t mind. The play was intense and left me a lot to chew over. The trains come pretty often and there was still a decent crowd of people on the platform, enjoying their Friday night. At the center, taking up most of the space, was a ring of six cops. They were turned in, talking with each other, large and conspicuously unusual. The guy with the shaggy hair and harmonica plunked down on one of the benches was only making a half-hearted attempt to play anything.

A southbound train pulled in. The cops piled onto a mostly empty car. The train left. I thought about watching for fare enforcement on the train platforms in Seattle. Waiting for them to board the car and descend on the people inside, demanding proof you had a right to be there. How nice it’s been not to deal with that.

A few minutes later another northbound train came. I got onto a car where most of the seats were filled. In a few minutes we’d be stopping at Grand. There were no cops in sight.

I still didn’t feel safe.

Anaea Lay Anecdotes, Chicago

Bikes on a Train

Photo by Sawyer Bengtson on Unsplash

Moving back to Chicago is the best thing I ever did for myself, and I say that as somebody who has not been stingy with self-indulgence.  I love this city so thoroughly I can’t find words to explain it.  That doesn’t stop me from trying.  “Look at that,” I’ll say when something catches my eye.  “It’s beautiful.”  I’m stopped, struck by fog crawling off the lake to embrace the skyline, by the sunset silhouetting the street as you gaze west to the horizon, or a mural tucked under an overpass, memorializing a person, a moment, an idea. Something specifically precious to that neighborhood.  Something sprawling and universal and touching us all.  It’s been sixteen months since I moved back, and there’s still a film over everything, a longing, a visceral need to be closer to all of it, that makes it hard to believe this is real.  I’m here.  I wake up and fall asleep to the rumble of the train outside my window, squeaking its way down the track over the alley between my building and the next, and it’s a warm blanket whispering, “You’re home.”

You are not allowed to take your bike on a CTA train during rush hour. You can’t even have it on the platform.  Once, years ago, when I had to commute to the west side for a job, I’d figured out that I could save enough money for it to be meaningful if, instead of paying for a transfer from the bus to the train, then back to the bus, I biked the bus stretches.  The only hitch with the plan was that the last train I could catch and still make it on time was scheduled to arrive two minutes after the end of rush hour. That was just enough time to haul my bike up the stairs to the platform, but only if the train never came early.  The train is as likely to be two minutes early as ten minutes late.  I was gong to save five dollars a week in transfer fees with this scheme, sixty dollars over the course of the job. Sixty dollars was more than my monthly grocery budget at the time.  So I explained my situation to the guy watching the turnstiles.  He nodded solemnly and took my concerns very seriously and then told me yeah, whatever, there’s never many people on the train or that platform by that time of day anyway, go ahead and go up early.  So I did, without incident, for about two weeks.

Then one morning there was a woman on the platform already when I got up there.  She was middle aged, full-figured, well put together.  Her hat was neat, and she had a blazer jacket over a floral print dress, and shoes I’d have to remove toes to wear.  She was not thrilled about the frumpy white girl on the platform with her bike.  She marched right over to me and told me straight up, “You are not supposed to be here.”

“I know I’m up here early,” I said.  Then I explained about how the train wasn’t supposed to come until after it would be okay, and I’d talked to the CTA guy and…

“I am sick and tired of people like you thinking you can do whatever you want and taking advantage. Some of us have to use this train and we don’t need you disrespecting us or it.”   

I didn’t say anything to that.  I couldn’t find a way to get across that yes, I can afford to stand there with a bike and looking sloppy, but I’m the kind of broke where I did the math on transfer fees and $60 mattered.   

That night I did more math.  I’d been biking the first and last legs of the commute for two weeks and it was pretty easy.  It would take me about fifteen extra minutes each way to bike it all instead of taking the train. That would still get me back in time to make it to my other job.  Not paying for even the train fare saved much more than $60.   

I think about that lady all the time.  She was right; I didn’t need to bend the rules. I wasn’t even doing what was in the best interests of my budget.  Instead, I’d worked the problem half way, and stopped at the solution that called for minor cheating.  I hope telling me off made her day.  Her week.

I don’t believe in unconditional love.  I just don’t.  Never have.  I believe in indefinite love.  I believe in deluded love.  I believe people get attached enough to the idea of loving a thing that they’ll go to spectacularly absurd lengths to preserve that state.  But unconditional? Really?  No.  There’s always some bedrock that love is anchored in, and love only endures as long as the bedrock. That can look and feel unconditional, but it isn’t.   

Unconditional love is a performance, not a reality.  It’s a devotion to the idea of love, not an attachment to the alleged object of affection.  Love without condition just slides off its object without ever really seeing it.

Except, I’ve been wondering for the last year or so, what is the bedrock for my love of Chicago? What’s the thing that must not change? There’s an anxiety around this question.  I need to know, because one thing that I’ve realized quite starkly since moving back is that I was utterly, spectacularly miserable while I was gone.  I knew it when I first left. I remember how constantly and relentlessly I was aware of that misery.  Then it faded.  Or I thought it did.  I thought moving back was a nice fantasy to dream about, something to consider doing someday, later, the way other people retire to sail around the world or to a hobby farm in the country.  (That is, in their dreams, and therefore, never.)  I got a little dedicated to the idea of someday, but not now.  It got to the point where somebody flat out asked me, “Why not?” and I realized I didn’t have an answer beyond, “Because that’s a fantasy.”  But now I know: I was miserable, and I was afraid, and this question is why.  If I don’t know where the line the city must not cross is, then I won’t know how to steer it away, or brace myself when the bedrock begins to erode.  As long as I don’t know the answer to this question, there’s a chance that someday I’ll wake up to the sound of the train and just hear noise.

Last Friday I had a full day with a scattershot of places to be.  It was the first nice day after a week of rain and I was desperate to stretch my legs.  The first appointment would require a train, then a bus.  After that, either another bus or a lot of walking.  Then more walking.  Then a bus to a train, or a bus to a bus, or a bus to a train to a different train.  The night before I stared at the map, checked the weather report, then went, “Screw it. First appointment is at noon. That’s plenty of time.”  I took my bike on the train.   

There were, of course, no empty cars when the train pulled up, but I did manage to dash onto one with the section at the end where there aren’t any seats and you can take up a lot of space without blocking anybody who isn’t switching cars.   

“That’s a nice bike,” a lady sitting nearby says.  “I would know, too.  My man runs a bike shop over there on Greenwood.  He’s got that one in there.”

“Yeah, I like it a lot,” I said.  “It isn’t fast, but it’s steady and I can bike forever on it.”

“Well, that’s what matters most.  You don’t have to be hurrying everywhere,” the guy sitting next to her says.   

“Exactly!” I say.  I mean, it’s not a fast bike, but I still beat the bus half the time anyway.   

We get to talking.  He wants to get an e-bike.  I tell him that after Seattle, an e-bike in Chicago would feel like cheating.  They didn’t know Seattle was hilly.  They couldn’t believe Seattle was more expensive than Chicago.  (It is. Oh my god, is it ever.  And for no good reason.)  We talked about working from home and making offices out of closets.  His daughter has gotten into drinking sweet tea, and she’s running late every morning now because she’s busy stirring the pitcher to dissolve the sugar and get it cool.  I suggested sweetening with agave nectar, because it’ll dissolve at room temperature, so she could brew it ahead of time and still sweeten to order.  “It doesn’t get all solid like honey?” he asks.  Nope.

“And it’s better for you,” the lady pipes in.   

His daughter’s hefty.  He thinks she’s fine now, but he worries that if she keeps getting big, the other kids will pick on her.  “Kids these days is cruel, with the bullying.  I hate thinking about how bad it is.”  The conversation lingers on the subject.  I don’t say much.  This is a man worried about the happiness of his daughter, stuck between believing she’s beautiful and wanting her to believe it too, and fear that others won’t see the same and will punish her for it.  What I think isn’t relevant.   

“I don’t like talking about things like this. It always makes me sad,” the lady says.  But the conversation doesn’t budge.  The guy is stuck on it.  He’s trying to move on, but this is clearly something eating at him.

“How’d you meet your man with the bike shop?” I ask.

My affection for Chicago isn’t unique, with respect to my affections in general.  I get cranky if I’m not taking time to read something engrossing relatively regularly.  I got attached enough to my houseplants that after they all died in the move from Seattle, I wound up in a consult with a lady in a plant shop that looked an awful lot like a grief counseling session.  I wore a hoodie my sister gave me to the point it was in utter tatters.  I didn’t stop wearing it until she gave me a nearly identical one to replace it.  The original still hangs like an ornament in my bedroom.  I care about people, sure.  They’re great.  But ideas? Objects?  Rituals or things I can grasp and tie stories and meaning to?  The word that’s needed here is “sentimental.”  I’m prone to pathological sentimentality.   

Though, admittedly, Chicago is very large, and very abstract, and very impossible to put on a shelf or hang from a bedpost.  There are still parts of the city I’ve never been to.  More things I haven’t seen than I have.  I’ve been in love with this place over half my life, but I’m painfully aware that I’ve only scratched the surface of knowing it.  My affection here is founded as much on my idea of the place, my individual, idiosyncratic sliver of experience here, as it is on what it really, truly, genuinely is.  I am every parent who loves the idea of their child more than the young person growing up in front of them.  Every newlywed as enraptured with the fairy tale of happily ever after as the actual commitment they’ve made.   

I never lived near enough to the train to hear it, when I lived here before. It doesn’t make sense to have that sound wrapped up in nostalgia, for it to provide comfort to me now that I’m back.  Everything about my persistent, dedicated devotion is overblown and irrational.  I know this.  I’m aware of it in the same breath where I stop at a street corner, point at something, and go, “Isn’t that beautiful?”

They’ve been together fifteen years.  He was selling her Avon and she kept going back.  Then he opened the bike shop and she helped.  They have two kids together and she glows when she talks about him.  “I haven’t ever married him, though,” she says.

“Nothing wrong with that,” I say with a shrug.  “Marriage is overrated.”

“No!” the guy protests.  “There’s nothing more beautiful than a loving commitment.”

“Sure, that’s nice.”  I don’t think that’s nice, but I’m talking to a married man.  No reason to be rude.  “But when somebody comes home to me, I want it to be because they chose it right then in that moment, not because they have to.”

“That is a beautiful way of looking at it,” the lady says.  “I’m going to take that for myself.  They’re with me because they want to be.”

“Are you married?” the guy asks.

I do a double take.

“Does she sound like a married woman?  Aren’t you hearing her?  She doesn’t like marriage.”

I feel bad for the guy.  I hijacked his moment of worrying about his daughter into a conversation that’s disparaging his choices and values.  “It’s not that, exactly.  I’ve just seen a lot of friends who are with people who aren’t worthy of them. I think they would have left if they weren’t married, and that’d be better.”

It’s been sixteen months since I came back and I still have no idea what my condition is.  Where the bounds on my affection are.  I have no idea how to ward off the day when I’ll hear somebody talk about wanting to leave Chicago and nod along, instead of quietly liking them less.  I want to fortify against that erosion, to battle whatever apathy or exhaustion or jaded numbness might come between me and the giddy awe I feel every time I look around and go, “Yes, it’s true. I’m home.”  I haven’t found it yet, but I’m going to keep looking.  I’ll walk and bike and ride every block until I know the city like a family quilt.  I’ll clutch it tight, wrapping it around my shoulders as I listen to the train rumble by, knowing my love is real because it’s conditional, but defended.  Eternal.

Beautiful.