Time and Space
I walked past this one pocket of Chicago space today on my way back from buying a small bible for a prop at Books A Million! (or BAM! if you're incredibly stupid.) I was taken aback by this pocket of space, though to you it would not seem unusual at all. It was five feet of building foundation on Adams st. downtown, between My Favorite Muffin and a jewelry store called Sydel & Sydel.

I have what the white coats call temperal lobe epilepsy. It's a bizarre seizure disorder that I'm well medicated for, thank goodness. People with my brand of epilepsy tend to have certain personality traits in commmon. Among those traits is a marked interest or in some cases an obsession with time, time travel, time and space, etc. I have always loved time travel stories, and do have a certain pre-occupation with time, with the future and the past.

I stopped and stared at this space because it occured to me that in 1999, when I first moved to Chicago, when I took my very first trip downtown on a July weekday of that year, I leaned against the wall in that space and wrote in my journal. I was overwhelmed by the new city. I was excited, stunned, in awe. I had never lived in a city before--not a real one. I was unemployed, early for an appointment with a temp agency called A Personnel Committment. I was living in Hyde Park. I had no idea how to use the El. I didn't have enough money to get myself a coffee or a muffin. I just had time and I took it to write.

I have looked for that journal entry before, scoured my old notebooks and found nothing. But I remember vaguely what it was about. I wondered about this new life ahead of me. I waxed dreamily about the vastness of the city, and the beauty of the strange lives around me--each in the middle of his or her routine. I tried to look forward, to see what my routines would look like set against this white city's skyline. I tried to envision where I would be, and wrote about how impossible peering into that terrified mist was. But I knew that in a few years, I would have a new life, a new family, a totally new sense of home.

I was right. The crazy thing (crazy if you become pre-occupied with time and space easily) is that five feet from where I was standing was the jewelry store in which I would eventually have my grandmother's engagement ring repaired. I would then take that ring home to Genevra and propose to her on her birthday. Last night, while walking home from a late tech rehearsal with Genevra, I realized that my entire life has been reconfigured since that move, that everyone in my life, including my fiance, would have been a complete stranger to me had they shuffled past me into My Favorite Muffin that July morning in 1999.

This is not the first time that I've become obsessed with a space and the time that flows around it. The room we call The State Park at the Neo-Futurarium, specifically an old chair in that room has carried with it feelings of time travel and significance. I remember staring at it one day after I had been called back thinking "I didn't get cast. They're not going to cast me." There was a small seating area outside a restroom off the food court in a mall underneath the Prudential Building in Boston that for some reason became a place of relationship-related moments of significance. Four women. I was there with each of them for different reasons. I exited the bathroom and sat, waited for them, and then realized..."I've done this before." And that feeling struck me.

I have tried to find someone who identifies with these space/time moments and have not--at least not someone who feels it on such an emotional level. I've even had someone end a conversation with me abruptly because she thought I was being a weirdo. Oops. So I hesitate to go on.

But I do wonder fairly often what spaces will become significant to me some day. And I wonder when, if ever, I'll find another spot on earth that has such important moments of my history connected to it. I have always known that I will leave this city some day. But I have also always known that I will miss it terribly.