I’ve been in Chicago for four days now. My plane landed on a cold and rainy Thursday night. I kept thinking the plane would start hydroplaning the minute the wheels hit the runway.  But it doesn’t seem to matter what the weather is like, I always expect a tumultuous landing. I walked out of the airport to too-cheerful Christmas music and near-freezing drizzle. I was back in the Midwest.  My tired taxi driver was listening to horrible rap songs with ridiculous, easy rhyming patterns about things like garlic and onion breath. I ventured into the realm of conversation by asking him about his evening; it might have been a bad idea. He only offered me a grumbled reply that I couldn’t decipher. So the ride brought me into this city in a weird way, but that’s how things go.

Chicago holds so much in such a compact space on the shores of Lake Michigan. I’m continually surprised at all the different restaurants and stores along the streets near my sister’s college. There is Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, Indian, Filipino and Korean cuisine all on he same block. Hookah bars and International Food Markets and woman selling mason jars of honey out of her truck near the El stop. It’s drastically new and exciting compared to the small southwestern mountain town that I live in now. But it’s a good change. I went to a thrift shop this afternoon and listened to woman yelling at each other in Hindi about the price of a chipped antique teapot.  I watched a young mother lead her crying child around the store, hushing him in gentle Spanish, letting him choose one toy to calm his sobs.

I guess I had lots of expectations surrounding my time here. I still do, I want to welcome it as a time to relax and gather my thoughts, yet I’m fighting the urge to go out and do things, tour museums and see a comedy show or go to a poetry reading. I think none of those things are going to happen. My mind is overrun. It needs a break.

So I wake up each morning in my sister Mary’s living room and begin each day just like the last. I read. I do yoga. I drink rooibos tea and black coffee. I watch documentaries and movies with strong female leads, as suggested to me by my Netflix account. It’s hard to leave the comforts of indoor heating and padded carpet when the world outside is cold and grey. My sister’s home is a sanctuary, with endearing little rooms and a fireplace painted white, and wide windows that face the street lined with similar old brick homes. The girls who live here call the house Camp Walden. They compost and write darling little quotes and notes all over their kitchen tiles, like grocery lists and suggested names for the mouse that lingers under the kitchen cabinets. The space is a little cluttered, the way college students tend to be, too busy cramming for a history test to take out the trash before it overflows or wipe the coffee grounds off the counter. But it’s lived in and I’ve been living in it. I’ve spent copious hours transitioning from the living room to the kitchen and back again. I have a spot on the left side of the sofa, it’s got my butts imprint by now. I’ve finished reading a book, a murder mystery set in a small, secluded Indiana town. I’ve written two poems, one on the dunes of Michigan.

Too often all I do is stare at the snow falling outside the windows.  I think entirely too much. I search for cheap airline tickets to Southeast Asia.  I daydream about spending time in an abandoned beach shack in Indonesia, or an elephant sanctuary in Thailand. Tonight I went to my sister’s friend’s apartment and ate acorn squash and tomato soup and homemade applesauce with cinnamon.

Now I sit in a busy coffee shop and write this piece, while two Russian students complain; I only know this because they throw in random English words.

Tomorrow I might do something; I hear the Art Institute of Chicago is free on Tuesday evenings. Or maybe I’ll just snuggle with a blanket and a book; I started Reading Lolita in Tehran.