Future comfort

I remember this light being just so and the air being just this steamy. These walls of architecture were so new to me then. This same noon meeting I come to today I came to back then, too. Only then I was crying uncontrollably. I was walking around stuck in my fear. This place, this city that I knew was the right city, just felt painfully foreign.

I might have just looked at my bank account and realized the extra grand that the truck company took me for. Shit. I might have just tried to call some friend in Boston and found myself unable to hear them on my cell phone because the streets were so loud. Outside was loud. Inside was no privacy. This was not the graduate school experience at all. This was hell. And whom was I trying to call? One of the two men I left on the east coast who each thought they were my boyfriend? Perhaps I had just walked out of that store over there. I packed two suitcases full with shoes to move here. The first thing I bought in Chicago? Shoes.

No, I bump into her on this street feel the flood fear and misery washing through her and leaking out her eyes. The usual toe holds for control and sanity were simply not in place here. There’s no certainty on whom to trust, yet, and everyone seems so weird and fake. There’s no job yet to sink one’s time into and to distance consciousness from the discomfort. There’s no understanding of where are those niches that offer the same comfort as home did. And there’s not much money. There’s only the itchy, anxious rawness that comes from having all familiarity ripped away. Yeah, I see her walking around the east loop. She’s only been in her new home for 6 days. She can’t stop crying.

I know there were moments when I felt it back then. A song lyric would hit my ears: “Help is on it’s way! From places you don’t know about, from friends you haven’t met yet! Help is on it’s way!” I stood in front of the Buddha statue in the Art Institute and a guard came up to me to tell me that it’s a wishing Buddha. When I shut my eyes to make a wish I suddenly realize that I don’t need anything. Sometimes I look up for a second and feel a strange moment of relief. I would have a laugh with a new friend or receive a spontaneous neck massage from Elaine- truly the hands of god. It was like being stuck in a dark closet and having someone flicking the light switch on and off. I find my way, I loose it again. I experience small moments of “OK” but can’t manage to string moments together into some sort of normal feeling day.

In the sun, coming down Michigan Avenue to the corner where she used the ATM, I pause and give her one such moment. I still feel her running around and reach my arms back through time. “You’re doing the best you can. You will be fine. Don’t be afraid.”

So much has changed about the landscape here in the first five years. That ratty construction site has turned into a beautiful park. More space age sky-scrapers are going up. Sure money is tight, but the country feels more hopeful, as if it knows it will soon wake up from a horrible nightmare. As if some many of us are feeling hands reach out to us from future selves that tell us that we are just fine. We’re doing the best we can.