Home Away From Home

It is almost unnerving how quickly one decides that a place they used to know is no longer home. It isn’t necessarily the uprooting of oneself to a new place — some might simply call it a state of mind. But even at eighteen years old, fresh from a town I have never left for a life in a city that is foreign to me, the feeling of home seems to be something that you carry within yourself, picking up pieces in different places along the way.

So it has been a week. A week in a city with secrets, of lives untold in seventh floor apartments and history painted in layers on the sides of buildings. Chicago is a vivacious, wild beast that strives for the new and extraordinary, loud and indiscreet and unafraid of what you might think. But as I walked through the streets, under bridges and across empty lots, I couldn’t help but find myself drawn not to the extraordinary, but rather to the simple secrets that are weaved in plain sight throughout the city. Chicago may be beautiful and unique, but it is not its latest technology or sharp architecture of the new age that distracts me — it are the hints of a world unknown and left behind.

This first picture was taken on my first venture through Chicago, somewhere in Lincoln Park. The destruction of buildings has always given me a sense of forlorning — it meant someone’s hard work and creativity was being torn apart and replaced. But what I found to be interesting about this scene is that instead of noticing the decay and destruction, I noticed that amidst the rubble on the upper floor was a young tree. It was a comforting reminder that old things fall and decay for beautiful things to take their place.

This next scene caught my eye as we walked down a street somewhere near Gold Coast. As I become more and more accustomed to the ways of the city, I find that there are things all over Chicago that seem absurd to me. For example, upon walking beneath the ‘L’ for the first time, I was both engrossed and grossed out with the large dark spots on the sidewalk where the rails end. Initially I thought that it was from people in the city, growing bored as they wait for the next train and dumping coffee, spit, or whatever other unwanted excretions they had onto the sidewalk beneath them, until I made this remark to a local native and was told that they are actually oil stains. I harbor these undermining ideas of what the city and its people are like, and they continue to surprise me as I explore Chicago. So when I first saw those towels and clothes hanging out of a sixth-story window, it caught me by surprise. For some reason, the small-town part of me had always assumed that if you lived in an apartment complex in the city then you lived luxuriously. I snapped a picture, hoping to show myself that the lives existing within the city are a complete mystery, and that in Chicago, there are millions of mysteries I may never know.

Following a walk through the Gold Coast and Old Town, I found myself on the north side of Chicago, in some strange abandoned place that was overgrown with weeds and baked by the summer sun. The companies there were placed in industrial, box-like buildings with few windows, and everywhere I looked were empty lots with nothing but stray plastic bags and decomposing trash to blow around them. Upon seeing the sign ‘City Farm’ I was overjoyed — finally, someone got it right. Someone was going to come in and beautify a place that, even in a city as large as Chicago, could still make one feel completely alone. But as many good things can also give us a bad taste in our mouth, the ‘City Farm’ sign was a reminder of gentrification. It was my first encounter with gentrification, and until I walked through Pilsen I was under the impression that it could only do good. I asked, why wouldn’t you want someone to come in and make a worn place beautiful? Update it? Make it bigger and better and easier to share with others? Pilsen answered: Because it is our home.

Perhaps one of the largest and most shocking differences between my rural home in Michigan and my concrete playground in Chicago is the relevance of poverty. In a place where cornfields and forest take up more space than superstores and condominiums, the only time you see poverty is when you help at food trucks or are invited into someone’s home. But here poverty is alive, staring you in the face and asking for help. It is a problem everywhere, all over the world, but here it is a person I pass on the way to class every day. It was unnerving to see people sleeping on the streets when I first arrived, and something inside me breaks every time I see it now. Maybe it is human dignity; every person’s right to live, to be well, happy, and loved. Maybe that is what makes us want to reach out to one another, and maybe that is what struck me about the face in the conrete. I can’t honestly tell you what the artist intended by putting these faces in the concrete beneath an overpass, pressed against the white paint as though they are trying to force their way out. But I can tell you that when I took this picture, I couldn’t help but think not of the people of Pilsen or Lincoln Park or Old Town who thrive on living in this city, but of those who are forced here. Of the ones forced to the corners of late night city streets and lonely empty lots, to struggle to lead a life they never wanted to live in the first place, while in their minds they dream of breaking out of this concrete city and the things that bind them here.

The funny thing about home, as I said before, is that it seems to exist less as one place but rather as a collection of places all gathered in your head. Home is where the people you love are, where the sights you love are, where the things that make you breath easier and your heart feel lighter are. Home is that state of mind where nothing festers and the world only spins. And when I took this final picture, far above the mysteries and gentrification and poverty in the cool, quiet top floor of the Hancock building, I felt just that. I felt that if nothing else — if none of the problems I face are fixable, if the mysteries I know exist will never be solved — I know the world only spins, always constant and sure of where it goes next.