– January 2026 –
As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
When I went to Ithaca for school, the wee hours found me sleepless in silence, in hills where the city’s grid should have been. The darkness here was different — thick and rural, pressing against the windows of my dorms. No streetlights clicking on in rhythm. No bass rumbling from passing cars. Just the wind moving through trees I couldn’t name.
I wandered to the concrete steps near a gorge as the water tumbled below. Even as the town slept, and the last stragglers from Collegetown parties and library study sessions winded their way home up the hills, the water ran, uncaring. On the precipice of the gorge, a lake sat placid beneath the black sky. In the fall, it holds the sky within it like a basin, and on warm days in April, friends and I stroll on its shores.
I remembered my walk to the lake from the house in Chicago where I lived with my aunt, after a decade of moving around with my mother. Down the block past the Oakland Sculpture Garden where plinths raised bare stumps to the sky, asking for rain. Then the jungle gym spiderweb on the playground. My brother tumbled down its ropes one day in childhood, with a spot of blood on his head to show for it. I climbed the steps of the blue bridge where one night, my aunt and I gazed, mouths agape, at a golden moon whose light coaxed our shadows from darkness.
Finally, I arrived at the lake. The water rolled and a mother cautioned her child to step back from the edge. A man ate lunch from a takeout container and played quiet songs from his phone speaker. As I passed, I told him I loved his energy, peaceful here by the water. He smiled, nodded, as if the water, piling and always receding, lulled him to sleep.
Now, in Ithaca, a different water crashed so loudly that it kept me awake. The gorges were green and stony places where the Earth yawned and invited me in on days I traced its path downtown, slipping on rocks slathered with frothing foam.
I listened to the gorge like the streets that course beneath Chicago towers. As a child, I imagined standing on a top floor and shouting an echo down to the passersby, and to the South Union Street house where I lived. The echo would fall and rise again: like the ice cream truck jingle rose to the window where I looked over the streets of my childhood. Like the fire hydrant spray rose into heat-still air and lingered.
In those days, my mother grilled hot links on the back porch. Aaren and I shot up the stairs at her call: a styrofoam plate waiting for both of us, and the inside of a beer’s bottlecap with a pictogram to solve. Months later, after we’ve been kicked out for missing rent, she and I climb these steps together — perhaps to gather the rest of our belongings, perhaps just to look around.
Together, we silently remember South Side days and nights. Always a lot to run in, overgrown and verdant, everywhere and nowhere to go. My mother calling me home when she snapped her fingers and the street lights blinked on. Does she know how she moved worlds — changed the contours of the earth so it dropped into space at the end of the block; conducted the skies so the lights flickered on up and down the street, formed a path leading me home as shadows grew thick.
In Ithaca, lights stand dim and far apart according to the undulations of the hills. Dark deepens as soon as night falls, the earth blanketed with penumbra fuzz. The gorge pulls me back — not to itself, but to what it isn’t. I am seven, thirteen, eighteen. I stand at the window watching dandelion snow. I ride the Red Line past my stop. I listen to the water and can only hear a screeching chhh.
The hills loop on and on, tumbling over themselves. In my mind’s eye: Chicago’s concrete plains, stretching out straight and true until the city disappears in the far distance, and there is only sky and water. I walk past tracts of undeveloped land, grass shorn to the root, but tall weeds growing there, stretching toward South Side sun. A spider prowling into a jar. Children playing while songs blare from car speakers and make the air shiver with sound.
In the gentle topography of the neighborhoods, deep in the shadows of steel canyons, a fragile architecture takes shape: the wooden porch of that childhood apartment, rotting steps of childhood play, and the tracks that held me aloft on days both endless and too short, fearing motion and stagnancy alike. The gorge water rushes below me. A train passes in the distance, swirling air. I am a passenger, somewhere between the block’s end and the horizon.
In Extenso 
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