Chicago and good-byes:

It's funny to me how little of this blog is about Chicago. I apparently would rather complain than write about the city that I love. Chicago is the first city I fell in love with, the first time I realised that it is possible to love a city.

And yet, and yet-- I'll be disappointed if I'm here next year. It'll mean that something didn't work out, that I didn't get a job that I wanted. Chicago has become my default position. And I act like I'm not going to be here next year; I make sure that I do everything that I can think of that I want to do here. I think like I'm going to be elsewhere next year. It seems the safest thing to do, really. If I pretended that I would be here next year, living in HP, trying to figure out what to do with my life, and then I wasn't, and I didn't really enjoy my last few months in the city, well, I would possibly never forgive myself.

I thought that coming back from London would be hard. In some ways, the last six months have been all about endings, people deciding where they're going next year, realising that they may never live in the same city again. I was worried that I would spend my last six months here saying good-bye to people and places that I have spent four years with. Instead, of course, I've spent five months procrastinating, trying to find a job, drinking tea. Not terribly different from the first three years. Now I'm here for 6 more weeks, and T-- is coming to visit at the end. It'll be fun to show things to her, to spend my last days in Chicago with someone who knew me in Atlanta and London, but never here, never in the city that is so important to me.

And I think it's time for me to leave here. I've spent the best four years of my life here, but I'm ready to do something else. I'm ready for some change. Even though I sometimes wish that time would keep slowing down as we approach the black hole of graduation, it won't happen, and I think I'm glad it won't. Much as I'll miss the city and my friends here, it's time for me to do something else.

Of course, if I don't get a job, I can put my life on hold, get some crappy job here and figure out what I'm going to do. So either way, things don't look so bad from here.