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The trip back to Chicago was a something, and a nothing.
A liminal transit from A to A. The details change, but the landscape remains the same.
The trip West had been a quest for clues. An investigation of the outside world in search of insight and meaning.
The trip East had become an excavation of the self. The bits of scenery passing by outside the windows were mere props on a stage.
I don’t remember much about the drive. It was a cold day, but clear and bright. A gated booth on I-80 forced me to uncrinkle my toll pass from its protective layer of foil. The Chicago suburbs came into view under the muted blue hues of an autumn twilight. I was there and not there. It was a homecoming without ever coming home.
Familiarity is a funny thing. It can grow quickly in the corners and cracks of a new place like an aggressive fungus, given the right conditions and just a little time. Before October, I’d never spent more than a few minutes in Chicago, just passing through. But now the skyline looked like something from my memories, and ideas about where to grab a bite to eat didn’t require a Google search. I knew the name and some of the history of the parish where I’d be staying again — things I hadn’t known the first time — so it didn’t matter that I had accidentally erased all the previous addresses from the history in my phone. I knew which entrance, which parking lot to use, which key fit which lock in which door. A mental map now filled a space that had stood empty in my mind just a couple weeks before.
I stopped on my way in, and ate a pizza sitting at a lonely bar. I had a poorly made gin martini before switching to diet Pepsi. My attempts at friendly conversation with the man sitting next to me ran aground against some invisible wall. The ebony-skinned, petite female bartender leaned back against the bar, absorbed in and staring through clear-rimmed glasses at whatever she was scrolling through on her phone. I knew the food was good, objectively, but it didn’t matter. The right flavors were there, but all of it tasted to me like so much ambivalence.
When I arrived at the rectory, I knew exactly where to wait for Fr. Michael to open the garage. I parked inside, and he handed me a familiar remote for my car and a familiar set of keys. He gave me a brief hug and a welcome back. We talked about the trip, the problems with the car, the decision to turn around prematurely. We talked about the things I’d come to realize, and the seeming permanence of my exile. He listened. Let me talk. Offered his insights where he could.
I wasn’t ready to face it yet, but somewhere, soul-deep, I already knew I was never going home.
I was just still in the part where I was trying not to believe it.
If anything had become clear through the nature of my ongoing but limited communication with my wife, it was that the wall of ice I’d felt between us for the past couple years had been fortified in my absence. I would receive neither clarity nor closure on how we had come to such a seemingly permanent impasse. The answers I was looking for would have to be found either within myself, or some other place where I didn’t yet know to look. I am not the kind of man who gives up on the things he cares about. But I’m also not the sort who believes he has the power to overcome free will when it is set like stone.
I recognize futility when I see it. I just never believed that something like this would happen to me. Knowing a thing and accepting it are two vastly different experiences.
I had originally planned to be back in Raleigh by Halloween, but I knew that despite the pull to return, I wasn’t ready yet. The freedom, the agency, the self rediscovery I had experienced in the early weeks of the trip, these were all fading into a recognition that I had yet to do the real heavy lifting. It’s kind of astounding how being on a mission, focusing on just getting to the next destination, seeing the next sight on the list, getting to the next place you’re staying, sitting up late talking to someone about your life, all of it can distract you rather effectively from the deeper wounds that require attention. I had needed that distraction, though. It had saved me from total collapse. I had occasionally felt sad or indignant on the early part of the trip, and of course, confused at times, but also excited at becoming, for the first time in decades, the master of my own destiny. I had begun to remember who I was when I was alone, and realized I hadn’t seen that guy in a very long time. Maybe not since I had done a lot of solo backpacking through Europe back in college rather than spend time working out the logistics of personal preference with my friends. There was also a kind of ersatz, short-term hope that kept my eyes away from impending, long-term despair. A sort of loaner energy that has to be returned to wherever it came from with a full tank.
I had places to go. People to see. Stuff to do.
And that was enough, right up until it wasn’t.
My first visit to Chicago had been about sights and sounds and tastes and experiences and discoveries. I’d spent more time going out than staying in. On this visit, all of that was flipped. I knew the drill. The room on the third floor where I would try to sleep, the borrowed office down the hall where I would struggle to write, the keys to the kitchen where I would cook and eat without satisfaction, the immediate local scene in a city I had fallen in love with but suddenly lost interest in, every day shoving me a little closer to inevitability.
I managed to get some decent work done, catching up on video edits and posts from the road. As far as my readers knew, I was still somewhere in Wyoming, but that was only because I’d gotten behind during long days of driving with nowhere to sit and type. It was getting harder to write it all down, the kind of structure and sensations contained in a travelogue collapsing more and more into contour drawings of an interior war.
At night, sometimes, I’d take walks into the city, just to get away from the desk where I’d been sitting all day. On Halloween, I ventured out, not having any idea what I’d hoped to find. A little girl in a pink and purple princess dress and tiara came running towards me down the sidewalk at full tilt, her parents struggling to keep up with her manic quest for candy.
She was beautiful.
She was every daughter I’ve tried to raise.
She was a stranger.
She was someone else’s whole world, not mine.
People roamed the streets in small clusters. I saw very few actual children, and quite a few college students from the nearby campus of UIC. Every Asian couple I passed —him in some manga-related costume I didn’t recognize, her in a slinky-dress anime waifu motif — were talking about various experiences with their medical patients. All of them studying to be doctors, just like tiger mom and dad back home wanted. Brief segments of conversation about IV bags and hospital politics wafted to my ears like snippets of channels from a fast-tuning tour through old radio dial.
I found a Sichuan place that looked relatively empty. I was hungry, so I decided to go inside. They didn’t have much real Sichuan food. Fu Qi Fei Pian — one of my absolute favorites — wasn’t even on the menu. But they had a cold chicken dish with ma — the Sichuan peppercorn sensation that numbs your tongue — and Singapore noodles, which are pure comfort food for me. The waiter looked at me funny when I ordered the chicken, tried to talk me out of it because he thought I wouldn’t like it. I explained to him that I’ve been married to a Chinese woman for over 20 years, and suddenly felt like I was lying for saying it without the newfound, requisite caveats. I was going to have to learn how to talk about her in the past tense. Just not yet. Swallowing my discomfort at the thought, I explained that I was familiar with some of the less “white people-friendly” aspects of Chinese cuisine, and even surprised him by noticing that he was speaking Cantonese to his co-workers, not Mandarin. That meant, I told him, that I knew he wasn’t from the Sichuan province in Northern China.
“So where are you from?” I asked him.
“Guangzhou,” he said, making a face like he’d been caught in some kind of lie.
“So how did you wind up working here?” I asked.
He explained to me that unlike many of his fellow Cantonese, he enjoyed spicy cuisine. Got a job in a kitchen at a Sichuan place when he first came to America, and it stuck.
He didn’t try to talk me out of my order after that.
On my walk back, I passed a very busy Boba Tea shop called Gathers. A guy in an inflatable minion costume was standing near the curb, trying to attract business to a place that could barely fit anyone else inside. I ordered a Hong Kong tea and tried to stay out of the way of a throng of mostly foreign college kids inside the tiny store, taking selfies together in their costumes in front of a Halloween-themed background on the wall.
Tea finally in hand, I made my way back to the rectory, enjoying the bittersweet taste, chewing the tapioca bubbles as they arrived through the wide straw, just soaking in the scenery. It didn’t feel like Halloween. It was the first time in decades I wasn’t taking kids trick-or-treating. I didn’t exactly miss being on that particular duty for a change, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I did miss seeing my kids being excited about it. Without that, what even was the point?
Over the course of the evening, the sky had grown increasingly overcast, and the thick cloud layer was reflecting the city lights with an eerie, orange-brown glow. The lighting on the church created a kind of chiaroscuro effect, and the structure stood in stark contrast against the mottled sky, creating a gothic-noir ambience that was oddly on the nose. I made my way up to the rooftop deck and tried to get some drone photos, but there was a lot of helicopter traffic for some reason, and whichever agency was behind it must have been jamming the signal. I couldn’t fly the thing more than 100 feet or so away in any direction without losing connection completely. On a clear day, under normal conditions, it has a range of up to a mile.
After Halloween, the days in Chicago all kind of jumble together. Holed up in some retired priest’s unused office, surrounded by his abandoned books and decor, writing and editing, cooking food from the local grocery store to avoid the expense of eating out, spending 23 out of every 24 hours alone. It’s all just a big blur.
I did venture out a couple more times. I got a weird cabbage pancake and the best gluten free donut I’ve ever had from an okonomiyaki place called Gaijin. I tried a latte from Intelligentsia, which I’d been hearing about since I first got into third wave coffee nearly 20 years ago. I pulled up to the shore of Lake Michigan. At the recommendation of a reader, I tried Al’s Italian Beef. Like too many things these days, it was overpriced and underwhelming.
My heart just wasn’t in any of it. Whatever magic there had been in the trip, whatever re-invigorated sense of wanderlust had blossomed to life within me in the early days of the adventure, it had died back down, compressing into a hard knot of steady, anxious pressure.
I had to find a way to go back.
I had to figure out how I was going to make my life work without all the things that had always made it a life worth living.
I was dragging my feet because I wasn’t ready and I knew it. But I was feeling urgency because I was running out of time to get my mind right.
“You’re going to make it,” Fr. Michael would tell me when we’d occasionally bump into each other and have our little chats. He was busy, but he always made sure to check in on me. It was nice. You don’t realize how much you miss that kind of thing until it’s gone.
“I don’t know how I know,” he’d say, through an almost-laugh, “but I know. You’re gonna be OK.”
It was reassuring to hear, but I didn’t feel really the truth of it. My nights had become elaborate performances of avoiding trying to go to sleep. I would distract myself by working late, or scrolling for hours, or trying to find a way to make myself too tired to stay awake. Because the interim period between my crappy coping mechanisms and the moment I finally lapsed into unconsciousness was when the ghosts came.
The ghost of her presence and her love, both of which had faded long before I left.
The ghost of tucking in my children, or hearing their laughter when they were supposed to be in bed, or having them beside me as they slept.
The ghost of what was.
The ghost of what could have been, but wasn’t.
The ghost of what would never be.
The ghost of what I should have done instead.
The ghost of my perspective on what had gone wrong, forever being rewritten and invalidated.
The ghost of another night alone in an empty bed.
My nights grew later and later. 3AM. 4AM. My mornings sleeping in stretched almost into afternoons. I started making a point of making my bed when I got up, just to gain an inch of ground back over my life. Growing up, nobody cared if I made the bed. Being married, my wife cared enough that it became a point of contention. In all my life, I had never imposed this small act of order over my day because I chose to.
“I am the type of man who makes his bed,” I told myself. It was a small win, but not an insignificant one.
Still, I was struggling. One night, on one of my walks, I poured a little whiskey into my Yeti mug and fired up a cigar. I walked the same route I always did, past the library, the little boba shop, the neon sign for Frank Zappa the doctor, not the musician, all the little architectural quirks up and down Taylor Street. It was finally getting cold after a long, mild autumn. As I walked, it started to drizzle.
In Chicago, pedestrians rule. It doesn’t matter what the traffic light says. The crosswalks are sacrosanct. So when I stepped out to cross a street and a car almost ran me over, I was surprised. I’d gotten used to the local way of doing things.
But more than surprised, I was angry. There was a lot behind that anger, and I’m not sure I could accurately unpack it right now if I tried. But I looked in that car, and despite seeing that it was three young black men in inner city Chicago, I stood there by the window of the driver’s side not budging.
“Really?” I said, loud enough that they could hear me through the glass, “that’s what you’re gonna fucking do?!”
They stared at me from inside the car. I felt my grip tighten around the handle of the steel mug like I was wearing yuppie brass knuckles. I was bigger than any of them individually, but there were three of them, and I’m no young man. I’m not in any kind of shape that isn’t round. I’m not even a fighter. I was just done.
I stood my ground. They kept looking. The moment hung there, tense and indeterminate. I was Schrodinger’s crime statistic for a full five seconds. Then, without a word, the tension broke, and they accelerated off onto the main street. And I found myself thinking that I really needed to get the hell out of there before I got myself killed. A man who feels like he has nothing to lose doesn’t always make the best decisions.
On my way back, I passed a car accident. Nobody looked like they were hurt, but the vehicles were blocking the middle of a busy road. The police showed up, and I found myself asking if they needed my help to push the cars out of the way. I think I just wanted to feel useful to someone. I think I just wanted someone to see me and appreciate me for just a second.
The cop waved me on, said they had it under control, so I kept walking, pulling my hood up against the drizzle.
I knew I had to get back on the road. Had to reach the last buffer, the last destination before I went back into the heart of darkness of my own personal remaking.
It was time to go to Michigan one last time and see Fr. Joe.
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