Weather

It was raining a lot in Chicago. I can’t really say for sure if this is a big surprise to me, if this strikes me as odd or upsetting, because it feels like I haven’t been here enough to have an opinion on it. Many nights this quarter I stayed up, running on packing anxiety and Ex Lib coffee and once a shot of Ballantine’s, waiting to fly away from Hyde Park in a stale-smelling plane. I had a lot of trouble deciding what jacket I wanted to bring on the plane, because I was conscious of the weather of my destination and the weather here; I wanted to be warm when I got off the plane in Chicago, but I didn’t want to overheat and explode in Miami. It felt very, very wrong, having to decide which jacket so many times.

Sometimes the airport feels a bit too far away from me so I chalk up an excuse to take an Uber. I like taking these Ubers, me in my blonde hair. I know I look young but I like to pretend I’m someone else when I take these Ubers. A creative consultant, a hip analyst. I usually stick to those roles. I know no one cares but I still persist in thinking that someone cares (I care!), so I lavish in playing pretend. In the safety of the back of the sleek car I gain a sense of self-worth and effortlessness that I don’t think I can attain outside of this space.

It was a raining a lot in Chicago, I mostly knew this because I watched my friends’ Snapchats of the rain beating down in Mansueto, or the puddles invading the quad. I watched it twisted up and tired in the cramped seat of the plane that just touched down in New York, I watched it when I couldn’t sleep at night because the bed in the boat just didn’t quite comfort me enough. How was Miami, people ask. It must have been so nice and warm.

It was nice and warm, look at my tan, my skin is soft from the rough saltwater.

I took a bus to Michigan. In a poem she wrote, my friend Michelle called our fellow passengers seaweed people. Their sleeping faces are hazy in my mind.

My favorite part of my trip to UMich was dropping off at the rest stop and seeing all the items for sale. Racetrack uniforms and half pound hot dogs. Butane burners. Michigan keychains, pineapple fruit cups. Iced coffee is on sale. For some reason, Mexican blankets. I wanted to buy a 99 cent pack of coconut donuts but I bought the fruit instead. I ate it with first a cheap plastic pick and then my hands and was still hungry. I felt very silly. I talked to the cashier enthralled by the fact she was from this small town in Michigan which is just all highways. I swiped through Tinder to see what the people were like. How metropolitan of me.

I was annoyed by the way the arm of the woman sitting next to me on the bus was just a little too close to mine. But then she looked at the two fruit cups in her hands and offered me one. I grew red, accepted the fruit cup, and got to know her. She was in Ann Arbor for a funeral and hoped to be a successful theater costume designer. She smelled like marshmallows, as all nice people do.

My other favorite part of Michigan was eating a burrito slathered in ranch and walking around the campus, imagining another life in which I went to UMich. So you could pass by these people, and never see them again on campus? I asked this with a high-pitched and dramatic screech in my voice. I chewed on chicken gristle, letting the thought churn.

Before I left, Jeff gave me his school t-shirts. It was warm in Ann Arbor when I left, so I wore one on the bus back to Chicago. The sun and the blue sky tricked me from the inside of the seaweed bus, the insulated windows had played me, it was cold when I stepped out.

I put on a jacket I stored in my bag. I had packed, estimated, predicted, envisioned, worried right.