Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Chicago

Your streets feel empty. Your buildings tower above me, but they feel lifeless, somehow distant edifices lacking life to inhabit their blankly reflecting windows. People walk the streets, but they are shadows. All is muffled and far off. I don’t understand you. You are unlike any I have met before. You lack the frantic pace of others, the maddening dash and hurried impatience that is familiar to me. I wonder at you, uncomfortable with this strangeness. Could I love you like I have loved no other? I have been fascinated, enthralled, disgusted, welcomed, and repulsed by many before you. Yet you leave me puzzled.

I feel neither welcome nor forbidden. You are indifferent. Your cold wind sometimes leaves me shaking, but it is just your nature. The sun shines brightly on your streets; few shadows block its rays. It warms me, just as your cold has chilled me through.

You do not draw me in the way others have drawn me before, with curiosity beckoning from afar. Our meeting was a chance occasion, drawn together by acquaintances and friends, once, twice, three times. I still find you an enigma, sometimes warm and open, sometimes bitterly cold and distant, sometimes both at once.

You have a strange effect on me. I walk your streets in silence. Taking small comfort in the closeness of my friends. I wonder what this one makes of my reticence. He is not accustomed to my poverty of speech, but I have little to say so we walk in silence. With him this is ok, just as it is with you; and I am thankful for it.

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