mostly nonsense

CCI.

How do I describe home?

It’s like LA is bright colors and the sun beating down and nothing ever hidden, not your flesh nor your sins. New York is brick and glass, a city full of big dreams and proud cynics, the kind of city you brave for a year or thirty and feel every day like you’re winning some sort of battle. Seattle is warm coffee on a rainy day, Philadelphia is history you can touch, Las Vegas and Miami are heat, sex, and money.

But Chicago, Chicago is the strength of the people, quietly soldiering on. Chicago is trains that run on time even when it’s twenty below and battling a blizzard, political cycles that function purely on a balance of corruption and hope, a shoreline that runs from glittering wealth to frost-bitten poverty. Chicago, the city you forget about until you see it from the window of the plane and, unexpectedly, burst into tears, for this is the city that rose from its own ashes, that every day reflects its own skyline back into the clouds. This is the city that wrapped you in light and sound and the colors of the world, that won’t spit you out, but instead let you wave your own goodbye, and will trudge through the seasons - bitter cold and choking hot - to be waiting, ready, when you finally return.