Like the Wind

“I will never again feel warmth.” 

The young woman was sure of it. After a decade living in an eight-month polar vortex, Chicago was in her bones and kept her blood from running warm. This was evidenced by the saurian skin encasing her now witchlike hands. Hands whose dry white cracks, seemingly etched in the winter weather that made them this way, ensured the snow would always be with her, even through a summer spent far, far away. 

She remembered dreaming of a life in the Windy City but couldn’t recall those fantasies foreshadowing the cruel, unprovoked backhanding of the city’s eponymous phenomenon. Air, whose demands for pain were cemented in the razor blades of frozen water that lined her lips and nostrils as she tried to breathe in enough of it to yell, "SCREW YOU" at the invisible assailant who had knocked her silly on her way to work.

The Windy City. How she hated it, and how it seemed to hate her. It forced her to numb her body to the air and her mind to the inequality and need. It gave her no choice but to harden like a true Chicagoan to survive.

In a previous life, she lived in a small suburban home with locks that never learned their purpose in life. Here, in her city life, she didn’t carry pepper spray or position her keys between her fingers on journeys home. No, none of that. She kept a knife. A small but menacing knife meant for hunting. And even though she had never hunted or stabbed anything other than the leafy greens she pronged at lunch, she never doubted she could, without hesitation, stab anything the city sent to threaten her—everything except the wind, of course. 

How she wished she could stab the wind. In the young woman’s present dreams of Chicago, she commanded her knife to disarm the wind and the unctuous Midwestern hospitality that the city’s visitors found so charming. She slashed the corruption and the falling ice that targeted Chicago’s inhabitants in its game of chicken while leaving its tourists undisturbed in the city’s illusion. She even tormented the empty promises implied by the cities earnest lack of cynicism for ambition. Awake or asleep, she wanted to attack Chicago back. But it was only a city. And she wanted it to like her.

“What is it about this miserable place?” she pondered. The young women didn’t waste time with rhetorical questions. Answers existed, and she knew where. Yes, it was only a city, but one where she once discovered wonder and expectation. She wasn’t the only one to be swept up by Chicago’s allure, and she wouldn’t be the last. The city’s temptations still existed. She found proof of it in the eyes of the second city’s visitors. They were easy to spot—always looking up in every sense of the phrase. Giddy as they angled their bodies to the tops of skyscrapers as if their posture would help them float to the top. Taking in deep dish pizza as if it were the exotic cuisine of locals, not knowing they didn’t care for the stuff. 

Only when you transitioned from tourist to resident could you see behind the mirage. To the Chicagoan, the infamously intemperate city offended all senses, even daring at times to offer too much of a good thing. The tantalizing restaurant options made eating more difficult than choosing what to watch on Netflix. The promising summer activities were not a fair match for the finite days when the city relaxed between 70 and 80 degrees. With its architecture and landscapes, Chicago was, at first, inviting to all. 

No wonder confusion was the young woman’s status quo. She went through life in a barely habitable snowglobe. A snowglobe that kept things in or out based on mysterious terms known only by the city itself, for it certainly didn’t concern itself with discerning good from bad. It could simultaneously host the World’s Fair and H.H.Holmes, encourage a crooner to be an equally prolific gangster, and create baseball lovers who were loyal to different home teams. Existing in the paradox was a badge of honor. One that she donned more proudly each year despite her compounding discontent.

If it wasn’t a part of you, you couldn’t understand. What the bubble took, it gave back in an unspoken camaraderie with unfamiliar acquaintances and the guarantee that daily, she would witness something semi-remarkable. As she dodged near-death experiences, she also shared wordless moments with strangers who understood her more deeply than her rural kin. And if an outsider dared spoke a bad word against her city, she unleashed a metaphorical knife made from the repressed anger she felt for the place she still held dear. 

When you came to an agreement with Chicago, your feelings for one another didn’t change; they were accepted. That included the magic the city instilled in the young woman when she was once a visitor herself. 

Eleven years later, the woman felt those memories as if they were the present. She was awake but sleepwalking up and down the stairs to her apartment. With each trip, she shed her characteristic thoughtfulness while designating belongings for premature departure. For all the respect she demanded of her city, she had lost her sentimental attachment to “things.” They cluttered the existence she had forged here and didn’t change the past. 

As she somnambulated past masked neighbors, she didn’t pause to wish them well. She didn’t notify the sidewalks or wave at the passing trains. She didn’t ask the lake why it implored her to stay or say thank you to the break-neck speed of life that propelled her through each odd day. What was it about the city? The answers were in her soul, suspending her just outside of that bittersweet place where nostalgia and pain could be mistaken for contentment. She hung instead in the place of unfeeling. An agnostic middle ground where she wondered, rhetorically for now, “If I stop to say goodbye, who is it really for?”