Ashley must have left sometime that January. I remember walking in Burnham Park to try to clear my head and noticing the sweat drip down my back. I had bundled up with long johns, a thermal shirt, a fur hat with earflaps, and my long coat. Only to walk outside and find the snow melting into a thin fog that rose above the field in front of the Museum of Science and Industry and curled toward the upper reaches of Hyde Park’s high rises.
I must not have left my apartment in a few days, buried in novels and searching the Internet for news and blogs and whatever else to distract me from her absence in the apartment. So that when I finally decided to leave, I was still stuck in the weather pattern that had clamped down on Chicago at the beginning of the year, when snow fell every day for a week and at night the cold winds pounded against our double pane glass.
I must have thought that it would be a good idea to get some sunlight on my face. So I bundled up. It’s what people do in the winter. Layers and layers.
But when layers become an everyday must-have, you don’t realize immediately that you’re overdressed. Because no matter how cold it is, if you have enough clothing on, there’s a grace period during which the weather doesn’t affect your body. Where the clothes actually do offer a modicum of protection against whatever the elements can fling in your eyes, at your chest, into your lungs.
Not to mention, I must have saved up a ton of heat energy during the preceding two weeks, holed up in the apartment and watching the bags grow under my eyes. It didn’t occur to me to think that it was warm until I had crossed Lake Shore Drive and looked at the lake. It dawned on me that the surface ice had started to break up. I looked around and saw the grass. Saw the sun piercing through clouds over Gary. Turned behind me and saw the condo towers surrounded in the snowmelt-steam.
It must have been a surprise to me. I don’t remember exactly what I felt. Probably some sort of oblique confusion. Maybe a dash of deep sadness that I hadn’t been outside in so long. But I do remember standing, mesmerized as I watched the fog rise through those buildings. Incredulous at the miracle of the sudden warmth, incredulous at the piercing light through the dark shadows of the buildings, incredulous for lack of any other emotion that seemed willing to surface. I stood in the park and watched the fog for awhile. There wasn’t much else to see, with the skyline shrouded in clouds and the lake hemmed in and almost entirely calm. The trees stood black and dormant against the brick facades of the faded brick buildings and I waited, as if expecting to see someone wave out of their window at me, acknowledge my presence, tell me it was okay to go home.
