Dreamworld

This is Chicago so far!

For most of my childhood, my experience with long car rides was limited to the times I visited Chicago with my family. I have distinct memories of the days beginning with a delayed start, departing 1-2 hours behind schedule, stopping a couple of times in rural Illinois, and watching the windmills and corn stalks for hours along the highway. 

These trips almost always included hours-long stops in massive Polish grocery stores. Chicago is home to 1.9 million Polish-Americans. Not including my Polish family, who settled in St. Louis– 4 hours and 47 minutes away. 

We went to several different stores, sometimes within the same weekend, stocking up on a supply of Pierogi, Kielbasa, and Delicije to fulfill the requests of the extended family back home.

Although the drive to Chicago was only 4 hours and 47 minutes from my childhood home, accounting for the Polish grocery stops, getting to Chicago was a full-day endeavor. After hours on the road, we’d reach a huge plaza parking in front of what looked like a giant Whole Foods store that sat in deep suburbia but was instead all dedicated to Polish groceries and pastries. We were here. I don’t think I’ll ever spend as much time in a grocery store as I spent inside these stores. 

My mom conversed in Polish with the deli workers. I could usually understand everything she said, but only about half of the worker’s quickly spoken words registered. 

My brother Alex and I would walk up and down isles of Polish treats that spanned quadruple the selection in the local global market. Hyped up on the several hours in the car, the first 30 minutes or so were enjoyable. We entertained ourselves by cramming as many familiar treats and odd-looking delicacies into the cart as possible. We’d be making the rounds in the aisles for hours, with only the promise of a Prince Polo to tide us over. 

These grocery stops were the slightly too-filling appetizer to our main course of spending time in the city afterward. 

Once we arrived, my teal Converse carried me along Michigan Avenue. I was immediately drawn to the almost infinite feeling of access that comes with existing somewhere with such intense infrastructure. I could walk into storefronts and restaurants I’d only seen online. It felt like the ultimate form of access to what felt novel or, for a 13-year-old, cutting edge. 

I imagined that this was what life was really about. Trying on 10 items at the Forever 21 in the water tower place, getting fancy coffee drinks, and seeing dozens of people who dared to wear something as bold as a trench coat or mustard yellow turtleneck in public.

At thirteen, on one of these family weekends to Chicago, I created something I didn’t have the vocabulary for. It was a vision of a future where everything made sense. It was a fictional place characterized by a feeling, existing outside a physical boundary. It was the place where a feeling of freedom, an encompassing instant click with my environment, would be the ever-present feeling. Now, I’ll call it the dreamworld. 

Inside the dreamworld was a parallel Chicago, and inside of that Chicago lived a parallel version of me. In this place, I was myself but different. Both more fearless and more refined. Less real. 

But I felt the most authentic dreaming of the future self who personified this feeling. Here, I was the one who slipped through the cracks. Defied all odds, left her hometown, and made her own rules. 

The Chicago I dreamed of then wasn’t the third largest American city, located in northern Illinois. 4 hours and 47 minutes from my childhood home and 6 hours and 1 minute from my college house. It was a place outside of any tangible reality, not somewhere I could pack my things and move to in adulthood. But a couple months ago, close to ten years later, I moved here anyway. 

I signed the lease before ever seeing it in person, trusting the word of my roommates and a few out-of-context pictures. The image of the dreamworld had long been broken. Still, the person who signed the lease 4 hours and 47 minutes away was struck with a similar feeling of all-encompassing freedom and possibility as the one staring out her parents’ car windows into rural Illinois.

In my experience, apartments usually have something wrong with them. My first apartment had tacky vinyl floors and was pre-furnished with sad gray college apartment furniture. My second place had leaky pipes, and management that wouldn’t bother to come to fix them. Or the heat, when it broke for days in January. Or the air, when it was broken for two weeks in Missouri May. 

As long as I have known home, it has been imperfect, a reality confronted by anyone who takes even a short break from dreaming. Surely, there would be some quirks with the Chicago place. Just like there would be any place I venture in the future. Luckily, I have always found ways to adjust to the unfortunate aspects of my past living experiences. You can always shove an ugly nightstand in the closet– or threaten to withhold rent until maintenance comes. So, I took my postcard collection and many cherub-shaped decorations to line new window sills. I bought new command strips to fasten to new walls. I’m here. 

The first time I inserted the key into the lock of my new apartment, I struggled and contorted my wrists. I convinced myself it must not be the right key for the lock at all, and I took the key out and began testing the other keys on the ring. They didn’t fit. 

I’ve learned that these keys require strategy, the perfect angle, and wrist movement. For the first few weeks, I tried the method of wiggling the full key throughout the process of inserting it into the lock. The wrist movement does something that finally clicks with the stubborn lock.

For a while, it would regularly take me close to a full minute to configure and angle precisely enough so that it would eventually budge. I figured this (or maybe the fire alarm that goes off when anyone cooks) must be the figurative leaky pipes of the apartment. It certainly wasn’t the flooring. The apartment was built in 1913. 

Postgraduate life (I hate that phrase) has been a stream of job searching, dog walking, facetime calls, and inconsistencies that mark my weeks. Despite the distance, I guess I sort of am the person my 13-year-old imagination crafted. I still love novelty, variety, and access. I love that I can walk to a horror movie-themed cafe and be seated with an oat milk latte within 15 minutes of leaving my apartment. The display cases in the corner are full of Frankenstein heads and monster paraphernalia. There is a middle-aged man sipping coffee right across from the case. The whole scene reminds me of my childhood best friend’s basement. She no longer lives in the house with the monster-cluttered basement and playboy-page infested bathroom. And that’s the real fright. 

The 13-year-old on Michigan Avenue wasn’t thinking about how one day I would need to be reminded of the monster-themed basement. I wasn’t considering whether I’d have to restrict my caffeine intake past 12 p.m. after a severe and sudden panic disorder terrorized my senior year of college. No memories of leaky pipes, ugly nightstands, or landlords who ignored my calls. 

I wasn’t prepared for the feeling of going to places like this and the novelty itself being more of an afterthought. I live here now. I came here to write and apply to as many jobs as possible before they close at 6. Places never close in the dreamworld. 

I see a thousand new things every day that put me in that headspace of the dreamworld. But it comes at the price of one or two signs that leave a lingering sting of the life I used to live and the mind I used to occupy. I haven’t been to a Polish grocery store since moving here– although my options are widespread. But I’m not free from the person 4 hours and 47 minutes and negative ten years away. 

The first time my keys gilded seamlessly, unlocking my apartment door, I almost didn’t notice how easy it had become. No key wiggling, no fuss. It wasn’t novel or freeing or exciting– I could’ve done it in my sleep. The awkward pinching movement had somehow become just as reliable as the keys to the house I lived in for two years prior. Whether it’s leaky pipes or tricky locks, I think we always adjust.