“Where Do We Go, Nobody Knows”

Imagine a giant revolving door: one that’s big enough to fit five to ten people in each pocket as it rotates. You step in with a handful of your closest pals. You stay in the revolving door as it goes round, but some of your friends slip out, and new ones step in. You keep revolving, because you haven’t decided on another destination just yet. In the meantime, you find that your circle of friends has reshaped itself several times over, and you start to wonder whether you should step out of the revolving door, perhaps heading in the same direction of one your friends who has slipped out, or keep running in circles. This is how I feel sometimes, as I keep remaking my circle of friends in the oscillating lives of twenty-somethings in a big city…

Yes, another of my favorites is leaving Chicago. Kat got a job in NYC, so she's heading east in a few weeks. With all of these people leaving, I’ve decided that the least you can do is enjoy all the going away parties. So, that’s what I’ve been doing, repeatedly. Last night about twenty-five of Kat's friends gathered for a big going away dinner at Bijan’s Bistro on the Near North Side. I’d never been to the restaurant before, but the atmosphere was warm and inviting, with an eclectic clientele, which is something I always appreciate. Plus, the food was fabulous. (I had the grilled portabella mushroom tartine, and a side of grilled asparagus—I was in a healthy mood last night.) As far as I could tell, there were satisfied nods and empty plates across the board.

We filled up a long table consisting of about six four-tops pushed together. Seated this way, it can always be a bit awkward to socialize, particularly when you don’t know most of the dinner guests. It’s difficult to communicate with people on the other end of the table, and someone in the middle can easily become trapped half in/half out of conversations happening on either side. I honestly had a great time and engaged in a wide range of interesting conversations (lucky to be sitting next to a rather animated couple), but there’s inevitably an awkward lull when the couples break off into their own personal chat, and the dispersed single people kind of sit there searching for some way to insert themselves into conversations that have already gained good momentum without them. Sometimes, you just become a third wheel, but I find that I don’t really mind it anymore. After a month-long dating marathon that has left me drained, disgruntled, and desirous of alone time, I’ve found that the occasional silence doesn’t bother me, and even as more and more of the people around me are coupled up, I’m quite content to be on my own.

It was good to catch up with people I’ve met at previous outings but didn’t really know that well yet, and to celebrate Kat’s moving on to bigger and better things in NYC. But it’s still tough to swallow the fact that the overwhelming majority of great people I meet in this city don’t stick around for too long.

I am always looking for patterns, clues, and signs in life, and I have to admit that I find it rather interesting that I have still not made any serious ties that would keep me bound to Chicago. I continue to maintain a handful of Chicago friends, most of whom don’t plan to settle here, I don’t have a significant other, and I have a job with a company that has offices around the country and even the world. I almost start to wonder if things are lining up for me in such a way that I can break free from Chicago if/when I want to. Once again, I am reminded of the below portion from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, which I have quoted in a previous blog post:

[T]he people living in the Great Lakes region are confused by their place on the country's edge--an edge that is border but not coast. They seem to be able to live a long time believing, as coastal people do, that they are at the frontier where final exit and total escape are the only journeys left. But those five Great Lakes which the St. Lawrence feeds with memories of the sea are themselves landlocked, in spite of the wandering river that connects them to the Atlantic. Once the people of the lake region discover this, the longing to leave becomes acute, and a break from the area, therefore, is necessarily dream-bitten, but necessary nonetheless (162).