arbitrary numbers

Chicago’s Albany Park. I talk about the neighborhood in past tense now. Last I was there I spent an afternoon cleaning a broken lease. The guys upstairs took a lot of the ditched furniture then started smoking some weed off our balcony. I came out with a microwave box full of leftovers from living: Clorox wipes, a wireless router. A chipped plate. Pale blue ceramic, like old cotton candy.

The sun set around 4:30. I put down the box, reached into my coat for smokes. $12, twice the price in Texas. I bummed a light from my neighbors and wished them well, then alone in the gravel patch parking lot I stared at that plate shrouded by dusk.

It was part of an IKEA set of six bought in 2012. There were five left that day. This one was chipped by a roommate. When I wanted to throw it out, he insisted it wasn’t a big deal. A dime sized nick. The plate stayed in our cupboard.

My mother taught me to never to eat off broken dishes, I realized later they reminded her of the childhood she climbed up from. I took a drag.

A liberation. I picked up the plate, felt the weight bend my wrist. I threw it, hard as I could at the building’s brick facade. At the shoddy, illegal heater. At the negligibly insulated wall. I couldn’t breathe in that apartment without gathering dust. The plate shattered into the dirt and dogshit. I finished my cigarette.    

2

At my last shrink I decided to lie back on the couch and stare at the ceiling. She didn’t take notes, it still felt like Freud. I got to talking about my dad. He died more than a decade ago. What I really remember of him is the stench of Marlboro Golds.

“You’re the spitting image of ol’ Ronny,” my uncle would say to me at fifteen. “But taller. You’re gonna be much taller.”

I found a picture of him and his coworker standing by the sea, striped shirts and caterpillar mustaches. My dad was slightly hunched, his hair matted. He was cleaning his glasses. Maybe they just got out of the rain.

He was smiling. Some say we have the same mouths.

“You sound just like him now,” my mom would say to me at twenty-two, on a morning after a night spent by an ashtray.  

I used to only see him in my cheekbones and the way my eyes fold. I’d been shying away from how I’d see him when I reached for my left breast pocket. Rejecting how that felt like a comfort he was sharing with me. One of the only.  

My dad grew up poor in the heart of Indonesia’s struggle for independence. His job in oilfield services kept us moving around the world. Being his son meant not really knowing where home was. Maybe he thought his biggest accomplishment in life was jumping on the first opportunity to leave the third world.

3

Poor self-control has left my skin marked with dark irises. They trail up my back and thighs and down from my shoulders to my wrists. I’ve coated myself in years-long bruises. The more I pick at them, the darker I get.

After a shower I study myself in the mirror. I want to keep breaking my skin. The way it reacts burns me up. I look at the tone gradient from my legs to my belly and I find it hard to choose. I look at my stubble. It’s already gained definition.

Doors here tend to close when they see me.

4

For a while I drove deliveries for a Chinese restaurant.

Once I watched the owner smash a beetle crawling on the wall behind the rice cookers then serve a tray of food. That job’s how I built up tar on the rubberized steering wheel of my 1999 Honda CR-V. By the end of each night I’d air out the cooking oil and Marlboros by driving to a taqueria that wouldn’t card. I always left with enough cash in my pocket for a couple margaritas.

For a while that felt like success.

5

A stranger at a bar noticed how I wear my watch. His name was Tripp. “My grandpa used to do that,” he said. I told him putting the face on the inside of my wrist keeps me from hearing the ticks. “Good answer,” he said with a laugh. He bought me a beer as a welcome to the Midwest.

“So is she your girl?” he asked a little later. “She” was flipping through the jukebox, the fluorescents inside glinting each passing CD rack. “She” was bright, in a lacy white shirt and floral shorts. We wandered into this local after going out for frozen custard. Tripp and his friend approached us when they saw our stares split between the World Cup and their game of 8-Ball.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t see a lot of couples like you,” he says through a swig of Two Brothers. Tripp was bigger than most, his greasy hair grazed his black t-shirt. His Oakleys made a crease in the crew neck elastic. “You know, Asian guy, white girl. It’s like, always the other way around,” I felt his palm pat my shoulder. My neck tensed. “I mean, good for you, man!”

“Yeah, I’m lucky, I guess.” I raised my beer can just enough to feign a cheers.

A pause. “She” turned to me and gave me a half-lipped smile. Her teeth peeked through. I wanted to kiss her. Tripp signaled his friend to get another round for the four of us. “Do you love her?” His tone felt mocking, still incredulous.

“Yeah, I do.”

“I know!” he said, then started laughing again. “I could tell!” I laughed with him. We started back for the pool table.

6

Alone, living in a neighborhood called Lakeview I’ve been spending more time quiet. My building’s close enough to the lake that wind eggs me on almost every time I’m in transit. I wonder what it’s like to push a stroller in this kind of winter. I think about the pawprint patches and the yellow snow next to trees.

Sometimes I feel nervous at the bus stop. Sometime I catch second glances.

One night I made the mistake of walking in Converse. It was halfway to storming and I could feel the slush-lined pavement soak through my soles. My toes steeped in freezing sweat as I waited at a crosswalk. I watched a woman and her Maltese pass me. The latter was the only one wearing rain boots. Four tiny red rain boots. That’s when I knew.

An entire paycheck goes to my being here. The track lights, the dishwasher, the stainless steel. I trudge through the snow in $150 boots, I buy gourmet frozen foods. It feels like a dream I defaulted to. One that’s been taught to feel right. Maybe I’ll get that nice wife and a nice house with a picket fence and a stupid dog. I look out the window and I only see white.

The closest thing to home in the Midwest is seeing you in the first bits of snow that dance right past me as I walk to work. It’s a small comfort every morning I see them. 

FOUR

I’ve never been to Cleveland. A few months ago the closest idea I had of it was from Drew Carey Show reruns that I’d watch with Indonesian subtitles at my grandma’s. A guy named Andrew moved into the spare room of my apartment after graduating from Case Western. He lived there for close to five years.

Cleveland was once a center of commerce. John D. Rockefeller is buried there, in an austere grave. People leave pennies on his tombstone in hopes for some good fortune. Nowadays it’s a place that’s closer to Detroit than anything, the kind of town that won’t be adding to its four-peak skyline any time soon. Andrew talks it up as an overlooked slice of Americana downwind of Lake Erie, a city where the cold snaps harder than most, that holds pockets of prosperity if you look hard enough.

He tells me it’s a bedroom city. Everyone has a tendency of retreating home long before last call, no matter the day. They find something good to hold on to and stay with it through the nights. Life slows down the longer you have to stay warm, the body burns itself out just to break even. He says the booze, the girls, the whatever you miss out don’t matter nearly as much as knowing what gets you through the gloom.

FIVE

Sitting at the edge of a boxspring one November night in Austin, I tried turning on the heater. The apartment starting smelling stale, toxic. I never turned it on again. 

It never gets too cold for Texas winters. I’d put on an extra sweater or a thicker pair of socks and the heat generated by cooking in my tiny studio was often enough to get me through the season. Sometimes all I needed to do was dance around. One of the happiest moments of my life was losing my breath hopping around its icy wood floors in bare feet, spinning and singing an Arcade Fire song until I started feeling sweaty, then falling onto my bed. If there was ever a moment that I don’t regret being insufferably hip, it would be that one. 

A year later and almost two thousand miles away, the heater’s on and I can’t really feel my toes. But I could never regret moving to Chicago.

SIX

“I don’t know why, but it’s like you’re built for the cold,” my friend Evan told me over the phone. “It makes absolutely no sense considering you’ve got that whole Pacific-Islander-tropical-fish thing going.” 

I chuckled. 

“You’ll be fine,” he said, “You always are, anyway.”

SEVEN

I’m laying a few hopes bare so they have somewhere to go: 

It won’t be long before my veins get used to the frost and my heart runs warmer than it ever has. Before I can nest in my deep purple sheets and feel a quiet unearthing of comfort from my darks, even cuffed and collared by the snow. Before the yearning for gray mornings met with a someone’s breath on my shoulder turns into a smolder and I accept it as it is, a constant, a presence that will always hit me hardest on Sunday mornings. 

It won’t be long before I can hold these things safe and unsullied, without dissection–I wouldn’t say I’m happy. But I’m so goddamn close.

EIGHT

My current job is just outside the Red Line station at Chicago and State. In the morning I have to push through a dozen people less than six inches apart from each other to get off the train. I look dead ahead to the exit, it’s the only way to ignore their discontent.

One day, I squeezed through the crowd and ripped my headphones off in the process. I stepped against the wall and decided to pack them into my pocket. It wasn’t long before the other commuters cleared the platform. Once I started for the stairs, I could hear the sound of cooing bouncing around the tunnel’s acoustics.

Six feet ahead of me was a fat, scruffy pigeon. Gray feathers, bright green tuft along its neck. I stopped to think about the logistical nightmare it must’ve taken for that pigeon to start pecking around for crumbs left behind by tourists. My heart warmed in the strangest corners. I tried giving it a name.

Fucking Phillip. I see him every week.

II. Kimball

At the end of the Brown Line, just past the north branch of the Chicago River, is a neighborhood called Albany Park. It’s a cash-only kind of community where the Jordanian grocery tosses its spilled corn flakes out front for the birds while a block away two Korean grandmothers bake cakes for quinceañeras. 

I live perpendicular to them, in a century-old three-flat that groans whenever someone opens the door and smells like it’s burning whenever the heater starts up. Once I tell people how much I pay in rent I get a mix of disbelief, scoffs and expletives that ask, “What are you giving up by being there?”

The question eats away at me when the clerk at the corner store hands me my change while wearing blue latex gloves, when it’s storming and the litter floats on the streets in a river of rain and rehydrated piss. I’ll wake up the next bright morning to laughter and the smell of paella from next door, to the romanticism of riding a train until its very last stop. Where it can finally get some rest.

Recently realtors and developers have pitched Albany Park as right on the edge of gentrification, that sooner rather than later they’ll barrel through the ancient, creaking bungalows and the quiet working-class families living in them will flock further west, past the highway, out of sight. One night I met a man named Victor, born and raised in the neighborhood, who said: “You know a place’s changed when you see white kids walking around with cases of PBR like it’s no big deal.”

III. Belmont

The trains sound like they’re dying whenever they take a bend too quickly. A lot of times, this happens at Belmont. 

Heading south, the Brown, Red and Purple lines feed into Belmont and start sharing a path, the tracks turn from a dizzying soup of rust and curved rails into neat, orderly rows. I’d close my book for a second and listen to the growing din of people moving towards the doors. Three quarters of the passengers would exit, half of that would come in to fill in the gaps. 

Riding home one afternoon, I stood next to a coworker for ten minutes before realizing he was there. He tapped me on the shoulder, we got to talking. I complained about the average forty minutes it would take for me to get from door to door. I told him how nice it was to have so much time to think and read but how draining it was; I could be doing those things at home, and I wasn’t home, and I wouldn’t be home for another ten stops.

“When I worked for Discover, I used to take the Purple Line to State and Lake. Most of the time, when it got to Belmont there’d be a Red Line waiting,” he said, “I looked it up and saw both lines take you to Lake, but the Red does it in less stops.” I checked the printed map in the train car. “So this one time,” he went on, “I said, ‘fuck it’ and crossed over.” We laughed. “You should try it.”  

Time on the CTA is a twisted arithmetic. Fifteen minutes can be the difference between being wedged close enough to strangers to know whether they’ve skipped breakfast and having the luxury of sitting while staring at shoes. Fifteen minutes can trick your entire body into living 26 hour days. I took my coworker’s advice the next morning. 

Shaving fifteen minutes off my commute was a revelation. 

IV. Merchandise Mart

On the first day of my first job in town, I got off the Brown Line at a station more than a mile walk away from where I needed to be. The weekend prior was spent packing my material life into a cross-country U-Haul. A buddy and I left Austin at 11 AM on Saturday and drove through the night to get to my new apartment by 8 on Sunday. We ran on jet fuel and pop music. By that morning it was fumes.

My harried scrambling served as a quick lesson on navigation in the style of Stonehenge. The rising sun funneled itself between the buildings, I knew I needed to go east, I walked towards it. I tried to play the entire ordeal off when I showed up in front of the receptionist out of breath and sweating through my clothes.  

That station, Merchandise Mart, became a habit.

It wasn’t the closest Brown Line stop to the office but it was close enough to where I could get a lay of the land by wandering to work from it. I’d still start each walk with a wrong turn, but as the week went on I started to panic less. I spent more time studying the jagged scrapes of blue formed by rooftops and the steam floating from them. I imagined the buildings as tumblers in a deadbolt, poised.

The last time I was at Merchandise Mart, I was holding your hand. You were wearing a striped dress, I was in a plaid shirt. I liked watching how you fixed your hair, lightly twisting locks between your middle and ring finger to brush them aside. We went out on the river in a tourist boat and I wrapped my arm around you, feeling the sun stick to our skin and fabrics as a woman gave a well-rehearsed spiel about the city’s architecture. All I cared to see was the way your lips curled for a smile.

Chicago’s a city where it’s hard not to fall deeper in love.

V. Belmont (Afterword)

Sitting opposite the way a train’s moving feels like time travel, like abridged history at 55 miles an hour. I could close my eyes for a minute or two and wake up seeing a version of Chicago anywhere from five to a hundred years ago. Sometimes it feels like rebirth.

These past few days I’ve ridden into Belmont wanting to catch a glimpse of you on the platform, the person whose hand I’d hold through the quiet dinners, through the unseasonable cold. You, who felt my heartbeat thudding on your back and the lingering sunlight.  

I want to see you framed by the brick gradients, waiting behind the blue–a small reassurance that you're living, breathing, healing. It’s one of the few times I want the conductor to slow down, so I can sit in vain hope that I’ll see you and one day we’ll ride together again.