After four long years away, I returned this weekend to Chicago. Our stated reason for going was Pride weekend, but I knew that no matter what brought me back I'd end up having to face a lot of emotions and issues. When I moved back in with the parentals in 2002 I left a lot of loose ends unresolved emotionally. I never really said goodbye to my independent life or achieved any closure to the situation. I just left and refused to do much looking back. I didn't know it at the time we made our reservations, but this weekend really turned out to be the best time for this little foray into the past.
The very first time I visited Chicago I came home saying I had to live there. I've never quite been able to put my finger on why, but I just feel at home there. I feel like I belong there. And I loved living there. I don't recall a single day during the three years I lived there when I wanted to come back to Missouri. I didn't want to leave. I just couldn't afford to stay. After three years of being totally on my own in a place I loved, going back to a situation where I was dependent on my family again in a place where I often feel that I DON'T belong was one of the hardest things I'd ever done. I guess, to make it easier, I just emotionally shut the door and forced myself to make this new situation work.
I've always realized that it was my own fault I had to leave in the first place. I made big mistakes. Really, really big mistakes. I needed to grow up, I guess. I entered college as someone who was afraid to break rules because I was sure the world would end if I got caught doing anything that wasn't expected of me. I suppose somewhere along the line I'd become quite the opposite, and boy did that catch up with me. So the last four years, in a lot of ways, has been a long process of finding a middle ground. I've resolved a lot of problems financially, medically, personally, and spiritually and even made some big progress towards developing my career in the direction I wanted.
But I'm not WHERE I want to be. Four years ago I told myself that by the time I was thirty I'd move back to Chicago, and if that didn't happen that I'd make a sign that said "loser" and wander downtown Springfield mumbling to myself. Now I'm thirty. I'm hopefully going to be making a sign that says "Fashioned By Jaye" and wandering downtown Springfield as a bona fide entrepreneur. Kourtnie and I are talking about home ownership. Still, it's not what I'd pictured, and I was afraid that going back to Chicago was going to stir up all sorts of issues to complicate my life.
It did. Part of me hoped that I'd find the old places, the old neighborhood, the whole feel of the city to be different now. I can't say I'm the same girl I was when I left, and maybe I hoped that I'd changed enough that the connection wouldn't be there anymore. Maybe I even hoped that the neighborhood would be different. But it wasn't. Sure, little things changed. The Gap store near my first apartment is a bank now. The pancake house is gone and empty. I didn't expect anyone at Seattle's Best to remember that I used to come in every day for a triple grande supremo latte, but I was certainly surprised to find that it's an ice cream shop now. Whoever lives in the apartment I left has beautiful crimson curtains in the windows. But the routine of it all -- the bus trips and neighborhood errands and trips to the Loop -- it all felt exactly the same as I remembered. I didn't feel like a tourist. I felt like I'd come home for a visit.
It's as if I'd left behind a piece of that girl I used to be, tucked it away there in my old neighborhood, waiting until I could come back and be her again. And I've made the changes I needed to make. I've just also made some changes I never thought I would, leaving me in some kind of limbo between the life I still really want to have again and the one I don't want to give up. Would it even still be the same if Kourtnie and I moved to Chicago together? Will we ever be able to afford it? Would I have to give up everything I've achieved career-wise to get the lifestyle I want? The only thing I know for sure was that it can never be exactly the same. Things have changed, and they can't change back. Everything is a compromise, everything comes at a price, and sometimes it turns out that you gain more than you expected by giving up things you never needed in the first place.
Mostly, though, the trip was good. There are changes I still need to make, pieces of me I need to find again. There are even some changes I've made that I need to undo. And standing there along Broadway with thousands and thousands of other Chicagoans at the parade, watching businesses and churches and politicians who are willing to join themselves to the community, just underlined the fact that we're not accepted in Springfield, and never will be.
Most of all it was reassuring to go back and find the connection again, the feeling of being at home. Now I know that I didn't make it up -- that I didn't fabricate some feeling in my imagination to justify getting away from Springfield in the first place. And now I know that it will still be there whenever I finally get the chance to go back. I don't have to be afraid of change, neither in myself nor in the circumstances around me. And I don't have to put a deadline on my life, either. I've always said I believed that opportunities will present themselves when the times are right, but I have to admit that I've always been afraid that the opportunity to go back to Chicago might never present itself. I guess I'm not afraid of that anymore.
In the meantime, I don't have to be afraid of going back and facing the things I left behind. It was so much easier to leave the city behind this morning than it was four years ago. It felt good, actually. Sure, I would have loved to have stayed, but it felt really good to be coming home -- home to the kitty and my work and my family and my comfortable pillow. I felt like I'd gone back to check up on the life I left behind, found that everything was in order, and could go back to my life in progress with a sense of reassurance. We both want to go back every year, now. It's not the same as living there, but it's a nice compromise.
And until next year I'll work on my life here. I can't be happy if I spend all my energy wishing for a life I don't have anymore, but neither can I pretend I don't truly want to have it back. The only way to get anywhere is to concentrate on what I DO have, what I CAN have, and be happy with those things. And if having those things someday keeps me from going back to Chicago, at least I know that once upon a time I DID have that life. I did it, I loved it, and nothing changes that.
So yeah, it was a hard weekend but a good one. The parade was fun, we won lots of stuff at Dave & Busters, and we met some really fun people. And the long island iced teas at the Cheesecake Factory will totally knock you on your ass. Seriously.
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