Chicago

Yesterday it was ninety-five degrees.

The kind of heat that makes the whole city feel swollen and wet. Sidewalks clutching the sun. Clothes sticking where they shouldn’t. Everyone moving with that irritated look people get when their own bodies become overwhelming and exhausting.

Today I’m wearing a sweater.

It’s like the city changed its mind overnight, and the rest of us had no choice but to agree.

I’m sitting on the back stairwell of the Airbnb in my pajamas at noon, barefoot on damp wood, watching the rain come down between the buildings. The roof covers most of me, but the wind keeps pushing mist through the open sides. It lands on my shoulders and the back of my neck. A few drops have made it down my sweater. I could move farther inside the overhang, but I don’t. I like the cold touching me.

The wood underneath me is wet enough that I’m probably getting damp through my shorts. I don’t care about that either. My tea is sitting on the floor beside my foot. Chai in a plain white mug from the stale cabinets of this rental, the string from the tea bag hanging over the side. It was hot when I brought it out here. I held it against my stomach for a while before setting it down.

I haven’t eaten yet, either. I drank three cups of coffee this morning, though, which is usually what I do when I don’t know what else to do. Coffee makes it look like I’m getting ready to do something. One cup means I’m waking up. Two cups mean I have somewhere to be. Three cups mean I’m trying to make up somewhere I have to be. I guess the chai feels different. Softer, slower, kinder. It doesn’t feel productive. It’s just warm.

My shoots were cancelled this morning. I should be more upset. I traveled here to work, after all. I packed outfits and shoes and makeup and all the little pieces of myself I know how to perfectly place into a made up version of “me”. I planned the day. I planned the faces I would make. I planned what time I needed to be ready and what time I needed to leave and what I would eat between things if I even wanted to eat. Now there is nothing.

It’s noon and I haven’t even brushed my hair.

I’m not even mad. That worries me a little. Not because I wanted to work so badly, really. I’m tired. I’m grateful for the excuse to sit still.

It worries me because lately disappointment has been settling in me without much feeling attached to it at all. Things happen, and I understand, logically, how I’m supposed to react. Good things happen and I’m supposed to act excited. Bad things happen and I know I’m supposed to be hurt. Someone cancels and I’m supposed to be angry. Someone praises me and I’m supposed to be proud. Usually I’m pretty good at performing the right reaction.

Smile. Complain. Cry. Laugh. Tell the story later and make it sound like you were fully there for it. Do the whole bit. But sometimes I’m not sure anything actually reaches me.

The rain does. At least a little. it touches the side of my neck, and I notice. I miss being touched.

I don’t mean I miss having someone’s hands on me. That has never been particularly rare. People have put their hands on my waist to move me into better light. They have tilted my chin, pushed my shoulders back, moved hair away from my face. They have held my hips. They have felt my skin and my bones and my lips and my heartbeat. They have studied my body like it was a gallery piece in their own private show.

People have wanted to touch me. People have touched me, as proof I was really there. I don’t know if I’ve ever been touched in the way I mean. I don’t even know what I mean. That’s the problem.

I guess I mean being known through touch. Maybe. Not handled or wanted or craved. Not being reached for because someone is lonely or horny or scared I’m going to leave. Maybe I just mean a hand that doesn’t need anything back. Maybe I just mean somebody touching my face like they aren’t just checking if I’m still beautiful enough to love. Like being held without feeling like I have to give myself up to stay there.

I think most people can tell the difference. I wonder if they can. Maybe everyone is pretending.

A couple ran up the staircase across from me a few minutes ago, trying to protect themselves from the rain with a guitar case. At least I think it was a couple. Maybe it was a father and daughter. I’m not wearing my glasses, so the world is forgivingly unclear. Faces don’t exist from this distance. Just movement. Clothing. The shapes people make around each other.

I watched their feet through the wooden slats. One pair of shoes, then the other. Fast up the wet stairs. The guitar case held over both of them, not wide enough to cover them completely. They went all the way up. I kept watching well after they disappeared. I don’t know why.

There are a lot of staircases back here. They cross over each other and turn around the buildings like they were added one at a time by people who never spoke to each other about their next move. Wood nailed to wood. Landings that lead to other landings. Railings in front of railings. Every view divided into narrow pieces of the world.

You can see into a dozen windows from here, but none of them belong to you.

One window across the alley has a soft orange light on even though it’s daytime. It looks warm in there. Not dramatically warm. Just lived in. A lamp. A curtain. Something small on the windowsill. That’s what most lives look like from the outside, I suppose. Just proof with no story.

I look at other people and see the things they have placed in the windows and on walls. A relationship. A home. Children. Work they care about. A city they chose to have everything in. A version of themselves they seem to recognize. I know that’s not real. I know everyone is confused in private. I know people stand in kitchens they worked hard to afford and wonder if they chose the wrong life. I know people lie beside someone who loves them and still feel unreachable, untouchable. I know a beautiful home can feel like a waiting room to something somehow worse.

Still, I look into those lit windows and imagine everyone is certain of the pieces of their life. They’re certain this is who they are. I always imagine other people know something I don’t.

This chai tastes familiar, homey and empty at the same time. It sits in my mouth like an unfinished memory, almost delicious but somehow devoid of substance. There are feelings like that. My feelings. Homesickness for no particular home. Missing someone who never existed by my side. Grief without knowing what actually died. Sometimes I think I spend more time mourning things that never happened than things that did.

Versions of love that only existed in my head but still managed to disappear. Maybe imagined things can hurt so badly because the body doesn’t care where the feeling came from, it just knows it was there. I have memories I’m not sure are memories. Not really like fake memories, more like scenes my mind built out of pure starvation.

Someone making tea for me in a kitchen I’ve never seen. A hand on the back of my neck. Big, wet boots left by a front door. The sound of another person moving around in the room next to me while I read. Nothing extraordinary.

I want the feeling of another person existing nearby without needing me to entertain them. I want to be quiet beside somebody and not feel like the silence is my fault. I want someone to know I’m in the other room and be comforted by it. I want to stop feeling like love is something I have to keep earning in small installments that come with a painful lesson.

Be interesting. Be beautiful. Be easy. Be exciting. Be understanding. Don’t ask for too much. Don’t become boring. Don’t become heavy. Don’t let anybody see how badly you want to be chosen because wanting it badly makes people trust you less and take advantage of you more.

I have learned how to be wanted. Im not sure I’ve ever learned how to be loved. Maybe those are the same thing for some people. They have never felt the split. For me, they have always been two completely different rooms.

Wanting sees an outline and fills in the rest. It’s quick. Nonsense. Love, I think, would have to stay long enough to be disappointed. It would have to be able to see the parts that ruin the outline and want to know what would fill it instead. It would have to understand that sometimes I disappear when I’m sitting right there.

I get torn between thinking I feel too much and thinking I don’t feel anything. Both seem true. I feel everything before it happens. I feel entire relationships inside a look. I feel the end of a trip before the plane lands. I miss people while I’m still with them. I can turn a small kindness into a whole future if I’m not careful. Then the real thing happens, and sometimes I go numb.

My mind eats the meal before my body gets to the table. I have lived through so many things twice. First in anticipation, then in reality. Maybe that is why life feels shallow lately. I’m already somewhere else before the moment has time to enter me.

I take pictures of things while they’re happening because I don’t trust myself to remember them. I am always half living and half collecting proof that I have lived. Then I look back at the evidence and feel nothing. A rooftop. A group of smiling faces. A city at night. My face turned toward a beautiful sunset I barely remember seeing.

I know I was there. I can prove it. I can’t always find myself inside it. That scares me. Not dying. Not getting older. The thought of living a full life that never gets deep enough to hurt. I don’t want to spend years being almost moved.

Almost known. Almost home. I want things to get in. I want to read a sentence and feel sick to my stomach because someone finally said the thing I’ve been thinking. I want to love someone without keeping on hand in the exit. I want to make something that feels ugly and true and alive.

Rain makes me think about things that I normally keep moving fast enough to avoid. It changes the speed of the day. That’s all. It doesn’t make anything more meaningful. It isn’t washing me clean while it delivers some cosmic message. It just removes a few options. People go inside. Traffic sounds farther away. Plans get cancelled. The city becomes quieter without really gettting quiet. Then there you are. Still in your own life.

The rain has stopped, finally. Water is gathered in the grooves between the boards. The stairs are darker where they’re wet. Every so often, a drop falls from the roof and hits one step harder than the rest.

Nothing is being photographed. No one is telling me what to feel. It’s just a place behind a building with some wet wood. I can breathe here. No one is looking at me. There is no audience in the stairwell. My bare feet are dirty. My hair is wet. My tea has gone cold and the spices are flat. I’m hungry finally. And for a small moment, I feel like a person instead of just the ghost of one.

The couple, or the father and daughter, or whoever they were, haven’t come back down. I wonder where they were going with the guitar. Maybe they live up there. Maybe they were visiting someone. Maybe the case was empty. I will never know.

The rain has slowed to nearly nothing. I can only tell it’s falling when I look toward the darker brick and see the thin lines moving in front of it. A drop lands on my shoulder. Then another.

I’m still not ready to go inside.