PRACTICE Write about Chicago. Write for fifteen minutes. When you’re finished, post your practice in the comments section. And if you post, make sure to give some other Practitioners some feedback.
Two and a half hours out of Michigan, I was feeling a little sane again. I don't know why I came, I just had to get the fuck out. Out of the state, out of my hometown, out of my mind. I knew I was in Chicagoland when traffic started to slow, and the city proper sort of crept up on me. I parked in a lot that seemed well lit, and well traveled, and locked the car. I stepped out into the weather and looked around. I left in the early afternoon hoping to get to Chicago in time for a sunset, but it was hidden behind a slate of clouds, the flat no-color gray of radio static. The wind buffeted me like an errant passerby and I smiled. In my mind, this is how I always pictured Chicago, cold and stark and just a little bit dangerous. Geographically, it was the closest of the Great Old Cities, a moniker I used in my head for New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle. I guess Detroit is old as well, and Grand Rapids is prettier, but there was something not quite the same about those. Sinatra said it best, "Chicago is my kind of razzmatazz and it has all that jazz."
I'd been working for six years straight, coming out of college, and I had an apartment and a mountain of debt to show for it. Dammit, I deserved some razzmatazz, some magic. I hadn't planned a trip, really. It was Saturday, I was going to have my late breakfast, read my e-mail and go to the gym. I was reading an e-mail from my direct supervisor, telling me in no uncertain terms that my work was unsatisfactory, my job resting on how I handled our newest client, and I felt a twinge of pain low in my abdomen. I wasn't good at my job, and they should have fired me a while ago. But they knew as well as I how badly I needed the money. So I suffered without complaint and they suffered me.
I shut my laptop and grabbed my keys. Left my phone on the table, left my breakfast on my plate. I got into the car I'd owned outright since high school and made south, then east. A voice that sounded unlike mine, yet still intimate, still familiar, was urgently whispering that Chicago would be something, and anything at all was better than reading the rest of my e-mail then going to work out with people I didn't particularly care for.
Now, I was walking in the city, and I felt better. There was no one here that knew me, no one here that considered me a poster child for bland, desperate mediocrity. Chicago is one of those cities that really is a melting pot, every human desire and regret and triumph and failure blending and fading into each other in ways that were somehow alchemical, and the result was a whole entirely different than the sum of its parts. I walked in silent rapture, savoring my anonymity and the feeling of surrender. Somehow in this, I was more alive than ever before. I think it might have been me; it wasn't anything special about Chicago, it was a joy to just be anywhere different. The stone gray sidewalks and black/brown-gray buildings under that cold, steel gray sky were more real than the plastic technicolor I'd left behind.
I walked to the cheapest motel I could, asking directions from other nameless, faceless people, as interchangeable as I was. I payed with a credit card and used the room's phone to call up a buddy. He had a truck. I told him to go to my apartment, and pack up everything, I'd pay him five hundred dollars plus gas to bring out here. I had enough saved to live for a while, but I made a note to see about some jobs in the city after renting some storage space in the morning.
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