Chicago.

I imagine that Chicago sleeps on its side at night, and turns over only when the sun hits the window panes at somewhere in the vicinity of a 60-degree angle, when the tips of its five o’clock shadow are lit up like birthday candles, and its breath, smelling of Maxwell’s and the bittersweet dissolution of autumn, leaves a chill fog that hovers above the pavement.

The lake is quiet as we drive along LSD. Perhaps it had been a late night, last night, the thin mist hanging over the water like the residual ache that typically follows the sound of shot glasses slamming against worn wooden tables. We pass what appears to be a white kerchief floating amid the blue blueness, and it occurs to me, quite suddenly, that I am still wading through a current that resides between sleep and awake. Tomorrow, next week, next year, I will snap awake and find myself at home, but today, this evening, I’m merely watching as my brother and his wife log another “first” together: “First fall in Chicago.”

“Do you remember when Daddy taught Omma how to drive?” My mother, petrified, my father, laughing, and me and my little brother in the backseat wondering why we were driving around in circles in a random parking lot, instead of either parking and getting out or going home. It is one of my earliest memories.

“No. I don’t remember that. At all,” my brother replies.

In the not-too-distant future, the city’s mouth would swallow us. The ferris wheel at Navy Pier inquires after the current state of affairs, its splashy grin dulled by the sun, and I answer as best as I can:

“I will find someone, I suppose, only when I can forget the smell of his t-shirts.”

In the meantime, I say to myself, I will let the water wash my feet, gather the silt from beneath my fingernails, carry me away into the thrashing heart of saffron as it spreads out across the city’s broad shoulders and down its body, when Chicago finally turns himself to me and welcomes me home.