Holy Chicago, Illinoise.

Well.

So I’m here.

Yes.

I’m here.  In a dorm room overlooking Hyde Park.  The view is great, the room is small. 

I’m on the ninth floor.  I’ve been here for about five hours.  Pretty much all unpacked and organized.  I’ve sorted all my sortables into the cubbies and shelves and drawers that will constitute their and my home for the next, oh, nine months or so.

My mom dropped me off.  It’s like a tradition.  She took me to my first day at Millikin; she took me to O’Hare the first time I went to Taiwan.  And today she dropped me off at the University of Chicago.

After she left I looked around at the beautiful, sunny day.  The green parks and the gothic architecture.  I breathed in the colorfully tagged street signs and ivy-covered town homes.   I have to admit, tears welled in my eyes.  I walked back up to my room and felt lonely.

I felt…isolated in a way, marooned.  It was the exact same feeling I had my first night in Taiwan–alone in the unknown.  No real friends so far, no clue of what is beyond or how everything will work out.  New place.  New bed.  New view.  New city. 

I know everything will work out–it always does.  My dad called me and reassured me that, give it a week, and the city and the new life will be “old hat”.  That i’ll have an ever-expanding social circle; that I’ll always have someone there to call if it gets to be too much in a moment.

For really loving the people in my life so much, I have a bad habit of trekking out on my own and then hating it…for about 2 days…and then loving it.  I wish Nick were here, though.  Looking out onto Chicago by night; each lamp, each light is like a little island, a warm, telling beacon in a sea of sooty darkness.  He would like it. 

When I felt lonely at night in Taiwan I used to sit on top of the old dresser on the bay window, overlooking city and the mountains; watching the never-ending stream of headlights on far away streets; picking out the roads that the black had turned to Icicle Light lined canals; seeing the dim, shining windows of faraway apartment towers.  The view comforted me.  It made me feel altogether small and powerful, like I was a miniscule speck in an unspeakable whole, but a whole that only I could witness, a whole that only I could understand.

Tonight, I look out on the buses and buildings, the sirens and stoplights of a city in motion and it feels like I don’t understand it at all.  Or perhaps, to be more accurate, I don’t understand it yet. 

Here I’ll give myself one night–one night of solitude, one night of isolation and nostalgia, one night of mourning an Old and tomorrow, tomorrow I will be celebrating a New.