I wrote parts of this blog a week ago. However, at the time I couldn't find the right words. I still don't know if I can.

Kate came back to Chicago last Tuesday specifically, and only, to visit me. I picked her up at Midway Tuesday morning. She spent three days here and then was gone again, back to Baltimore. And for some reason it hurt more then, watching her leave, than it did when she left in May. It probably should have been less painful. But reality is often strikingly different from the theory, and this was no exception. I sat on that L, fighting back tears knowing that thousands of feet above me, she was too. How is that someone can have that profound of an affect on you? That seperating for a month is enough to leave you completely defeated, disinteresed in everything else. I never felt like that before. Frankly, in previous encounters with women, there were times that being apart was a welcome deviation. Not because I was unhappy or dissatisfied, at the time, but rather because of the simple need for a change of pace. I haven't encountered that feeling with her...

And so, the last friend to be in my apartment, the last partner in crime, the last lover, the last girl... in the end, it is Kate. If my life was a story, and I was writing it - that's how I would have written the end of this chapter. Sitting on the L, with her head nestled under my chin. Watching the city pass by us like a projection. Quietly loving eachother.

Later today, I'll be back in Chicago. Packing up 1703. Taking a little bit more of my life from it. Killing it slowly with each box removed.



Being in Aurora is making me emotional. Moreso than usual. Little things are bothering me to no end. Like now, 4 in the morning and hearing the birds singing outside. 3 years ago I would have just been getting home, the sun blinking through faintly in the horizon. It reminds me of, well... the excitement of my first real relationship. It feels like a different life now. Someone vaguely me, but not entirely. Still, I know all the thoughts and senses that went into that era. The smells, touches and tastes. I look back now at the naivete of that person and it makes me smile. Not in a fondness for that time, or wanting it "back". Mostly a smile that knows the things to come and the timeline that leads to now. The good, and bad, times that are going to follow. Knowing the unthinkable will happen, as it always does - and the things you expect won't ever come.

Knowing that a few short years later, the feeling I considered to be love will be completely redefined.


I spend my days now checking my email and hoping against hope to get an email from Cutters asking me to come in for an interview, and then daring to hope I am taken on as a real employee. I want it so bad, like few things I've wanted before. Why?
• I will be working in an environment that is directly linked to what I want to do.
• As arrogant and egotisitical as it sounds, I will be the only person I know with a job unrelated to food/retail. I'm not looking to hold that above any of my friends. At all. That's not what this is about. It's because of the people who scoffed at me going to art/film school.
• Chicago. Even if I'm not living back there, yet, I will be going there every day to work. Commuting sucks, but I can deal with it. I'll be able to see my friends, and Kate again. It won't be much of a stretch to end up spending days or weekends in Kate's dorm.
• Chicago - again. I'll be well on my way to moving back there. A solid job lined up in the city means moving back there in the next 6 months becomes a much higher possibility.

But of course there is the supreme paradox of life there. That was wanting to hold onto the past while concurrently living into the future. As depressed and neurotic as I will be (am) when I move out of my apartment, I just know I will be as depressed and neurotic as I am now when my room in Aurora has been packed away and I'm in my very own new apartment.

Okay, okay - so, maybe, not as depressed when that happens. Because the excitement of that will probably chip away at the depression :P


p.s. David - I miss you buddy... *cough*youknowyourelikesortamybestfriendandallandImentitledtomissmybestfriend*cough*

Tonight Stu, David, Pat, Alex and Adrian came over to my place for one last get together before my place is packed up and shipped back to Aurora. One last night of all the things that I have taken for granted over the last three years.

There were some occasional sarcastic remarks made about "last times" - like, walking across the street to Jewel. Propping open the back door to use as a shortcut, and whatnot. And while all of that was tongue in cheek, I couldn't help but feel sad about it. Tonight was the last time I would be, with my friends, crossing Roosevelt road to go to Jewel at 3am. This is the last night I'll have with my friends here, forever (probably).

The last night I'll be sitting here at 5:50am typing away in a fit of insomnia, while they sleep all around me - in my bed, on my carpet, on my couch.

Time is an ugly and extraordinarily beautiful thing. It creeps along at its deliberate, constant, pace. But then eventually it passes and all that remains are the memories of the moments you've lived through. A rosary of experiences you sit down and pray, from time to time. It will seem to move slow, and then in an instant you look back over that era and think, "Where did the time go?"

I was cleaning out under my bed the other night, and under there I found a collection of artifacts of my life in Chicago. A mosiac of who I've been here. It was a microcosm of a life that contained its own ugliness and beauty. I can remember it all, but it somehow doesn't seem real. It's only images and ghosts.

There were people, friends from the past and present, I would have liked to have been here tonight, but weren't for reasons of circumstance. And it's for the best. Still, many people have passed through the door of my apartment and all of them meant something to me in some way. Maybe a profound influence, maybe a fleeting emotion, but nevertheless each held their own meaning to me in their own way. But, the people who are here now represent my closest friends and those who have made my last year of college the best year of my life. I am happy with that.

If I'm feeling this now, I don't want to consider what it's going to be like when I'm standing at the door to a lowly studio apartment on the corner of Roosevelt and Michigan, which has been gutted and stripped. My life removed from it, and only an empty husk remaining. A shell, waiting for its next soul.

It's the classical case of a closed door leading to an open one. Because as saddened as I am over the end of 1703, I cannot help but be excited about whatever awaits me next. The next place I call home, and that stands on its own two feet completely independantly. My own home, and a place to once again share with the people I care about.


In 4 days there will be one more finale. The epilogue, of sorts, of Apt 1703. And what a fitting epilogue it will be. I can't think of any other way I'd rather say goodbye, than to share it with someone like Kate.

Even when we both know I'm acting like an idiot, she somehow manages to make me feel brilliant.