Ordinary Places

I wonder if perhaps I have crystallized into legend back home.

How I disappeared without a trace one spring day and ended up down on the southeast coast of Florida, seemingly overnight.

I didn’t tell anyone where I was going, told not a soul. Deleted all my social media without warning to anyone but my two best friends. Lived without my phone for two whole months, not texting a soul if I could help it.

The homesickness ebbs and flows. It spikes whenever my ersatz kid sister brings up the winter, that’s when I want to race back home. I can’t imagine putting permanent roots down here. My cousin called me yesterday and the question arose again.

I get how my mom felt whenever my dad mentioned wanting to set down permanent roots in California. She would get the same exact way as I am now. And then that scent of disapproval on the other end of the telephone.

This is my life, not yours. I happen to love the cornfields and sepia plaines of Illinois and want to go HOME. That is my home. I am not a Floridian, for the love of God, I am NOT a Floridian.

I got my first Cinnamon Dolce Latte today from Starbucks for the first time in… 15 years.

Immediately after the first sip I was reminded of my college days, traipsing around Wicker Park and Bucktown on cold winter days, wandering into the Flat Iron building, the spicy walls of Sultan’s, and my old favorite haunt of Myopic Books where I would wander for hours between the towering stacks of antique books smelling of camphor and time.

It’s odd to think it’s already been 15 years between now and then. Riding the Blue Line to Division. I squint my eyes trying to see it all, the vivid flashes of time blurring between now and then.

I never thought I’d be here. In this very coffee shop, in Boynton Beach. Six months sober. Sipping a Cinnamon Dolce Latte and remembering the times I wandered to Wicker Park and Bucktown with my girlfriends, my ersatz roommates, still stoned with the wetness of hallucinogens swelling behind my eyes and ears, making my teeth feel like gossamer and my blue veins run crimson. I remember that little shoebox of a Starbucks stuffed between antique Art Deco buildings in Wicker Park. I wonder if it’s still there.

Chicago, I miss you.