Dear Chicago,

A love letter to one half of Gotham City

Dear Chicago,

I was told by someone whose judgment and authority I trust on the matter, that you are an evil place. That your crime and corruption are commonplace not through generational given circumstances but through a spirit that is synonymous with your being.

I’m not sure if I agree with this assessment or not, and I don’t know whether or not I want to.

I had been to O’Hare time and time again and never managed to escape to see your lakeside locale. Being there, I was on my way to London, Madrid, and New York, but never to see you.

It wasn’t until Valentine’s Day just last year that I got to see you from a distance while driving East down 290 to see the silhouette of the Sears Tower at an angle that presented it as some gargantuan, perched vulture poised to strike.

It wasn’t for another three months that I managed to escape the suburbs and see you up close.

My wife knew the best way to approach you. In from the Northside, close enough to Old Town, walking a mile and a half to the coast, before heading South to the river.

Your Neoclassical, Gothic, and Art Deco stone towers of America’s lost future are what give me a kind of joyful sorrow I have only otherwise known in the praxis of my Faith. The river you’ve placed some of them on gives an ode to London that in some ways upstage it with your audacity of skyward ambitions.

When I sit in the loop, there is a more a gaunt, unnerving notion I receive, but the beauty there, whether commandeered or not is of a visceral reaction I only thought possible from old Hollywood’s depictions of the storied American East.

In my second visit during the late summer, driving up Michigan Avenue, gazing upon Millennium Park, I caught a trace of an essence I had only known as Parisian. There was an American attempt at recreating the European Neoclassical aesthetic and ideal, and that attempt was successful yet something more.

Lake Michigan is not the beastly Pacific or the storied Atlantic. It is a mirror of the subconscious both individual and collective. It reflects the depths of the soul in clarity, and such attempts at a Neoclassical ideal reflect the longing for greatness in flat, humble territory.

Never have lofty goals felt so grounded.

When entering Millennium Park and standing before Buckingham fountain, I stared West at the Congress Hotel, reminding me of Ghiradelli Square in my home of San Francisco, and as I faced North to where the skyscrapers met the green, I reminisced on Central Park South.

You confused me. You bewitched me. You cried out to me. How were you so many things I’ve known and something I couldn’t understand at all?

I had to know you. I had to know you to the core. And against my better logical judgement, but perhaps in listening to God, I stayed to know you. I stayed to know the most harrowing parts of my mind while staring at the Lake that completes you.

I sat in the same coffee shop in Wicker Park time and time again, and it was never by choice, but rather some strange, unseen cornering of my psyche by an unseen foe.

There was a point when I had to spend an abundance of time in downtown last December, and just a few days before the New Year struck, I felt a familiar feeling in you, a fainter trace of a temptation I had only felt once before in New York City.

When down for the count, separated from God, broken in every way, and embittered by the world, I heard a voice call to me in bars of Brooklyn from across the water in Tribeca, Wall Street, and West Village. Any subway car I stepped into, deep in the middle of the night had a voice calling out to me to offer an idea that I can live outside of God’s dominion, a truly outside autonomous being, tempted by the lie that there are things beyond good and evil.

Eight million people frantically and furiously attempting to conquer the onslaught that is synonymous with the name “New York” itself are the greatest cover known to the Western world. No one is looking at you. No one has the time to see you for more than the gap of a split second. You are the only one welcome to disappear into the quiet space in the eye of the storm where no one dares to look. To be drunk on power, to believe that one is greater than all others for he can stand truly and unabashedly alone. This is the spirit that preyed upon my broken heart, my hardened soul, and my darkened mind. It ran rampant in the old behemoth, in the hearts of men working in money markets a century ago, and it runs rampant in them now. New York fell prey to this Nietszchean deception, this particularly alluring demon, and it made itself known to me once again in Chicago.

The lost future of America is harder to find in New York, as it is occupied by its killer. But you, Chicago are frozen in time, stalled, stopped, and in waiting.

In a frantic, ill-fated job search surrounded by an eerily familiar crowd, I felt that same whisper I knew In the subway car just four years prior and 1000 miles away.

“I’m still here. Just let me slide the stiletto, slowly through your heart and send you to hell. Walk this Earth in hallucinated ecstasy, while I hold your soul during and after this life.”

I could only think it comes from the pagan statue of Ceres that looms over this masking crowd from atop the Chicago Board of Trade. Maybe this is was the altar that housed this old specter. No amount of Art Deco beauty can soothe the unsettling aura it radiates.

But it had been some time since that old temptation, and I pleaded to God in front of the Tribune Tower, late at night for the future that was stolen by this spirit to be fulfilled. That the lost future of the men who built these towers could be restored. That this same striving by great men could be resurrected not for a deceived, Godless notion, but for a humble attempt at exercising man’s call to create.

I was not met with joy after this pleading, but further temptation of cynicism through financial struggles that bore a familiar sleeplessness and malnourishment by my own hand.

I crumbled and went against my word and sold poison to those who were buying on the other side of the bar top.

I made an idol of money while I drove strangers to desolate sections of the South Side and the suburbs.

I cursed my decision to stay, and I rejected any angelic reprieve that was offered.

I stood in a cathedral every Sunday with a heart struggling to pray.

There is nothing enticing about such mediocrity, and a painful downward spiral that began was slow enough for me to never truly notice it was occurring.

This mediocrity colored my vision of you.

I can accept victory, and I can accept crushing failure.

But I hate such half measures of mediocrity with every fiber of me being, and so I hated you with the same intensity.

My lack of Faith was exposed by the pressures of the world, and all that lake’s mirror showed me in that time was a man who had abandoned God.

Not in dramatic fashion, but in small, “harmless” decisions: death by a thousand paper cuts.

Mediocrity striking once again.

I thought that Lent would be a time of repentance in its meaning of turning from mediocrity, but my body, mind, and soul only withered further. My prayers surged in moments of lucidity, when hearing the Great Canon during Clean Week, after victorious 5am gym sessions in West Town, and in Liturgies standing next to my wife.

But the Lenten Spirit of repairing one’s Faith in that time of spiritual richness was not fully manifested, as my efforts were lackluster and succumbed to the droning “middle path” I was walking.

It is a terrible thing to come to Pascha and feel as if you are not worthy of the Holy communion and the feasting that follows. While the sermon of St. John Chrystostom that is read every year somewhat soothed my cynicism, the night was far more somber than Paschas I had known in the past.

There is an outright kind of evil that I saw possessing the faces of passers by in the Loop, West of the river, and in Fulton.

This is no kind of glamorous evil that hides in satin and seduces one into Faustian bargains.

This is an evil that wears no mask: one that is unapologetically ugly. It’s the corpse in the trunk. It’s the Michigan Avenue riot. It’s the killing without code. It is evil in evil’s truest form.

In one way, it is good to know where one stands, but in another, you, Chicago are undeniably stained with this horrid rot. With it, on some days, you burn my eyes and break my heart.

I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t know why it stays. I don’t know if it stems from the haunted past of the Congress Hotel’s basement. I don’t know if the South Side’s principality of poverty is a living curse.

I just know it won’t let go of you because it seeks to seep into your core.

But after all this time, despite its best efforts, despite its slandering of your name with the possessed actions of mayors and aldermen, it has not succeeded.

I see you.

Still protecting the hope in your core.

The light that hasn’t faded.

The same light I saw in my wife’s eyes when I first laid my own eyes upon her.

Through a dark winter, I had taken her for granted, as I took you for granted.

After a midnight drive up and down the North shore to recall a kind of love that is no kind of love at all, I vomited in a purge to start the spring.

Only after disarming such memories and understandings could I get on one knee next to Lake Michigan on Memorial Day.

I didn’t know love was so expensive within your bounds.

I didn’t know getting everyone you love in one room calls for such expectations in return.

I didn’t know I had to double the budget, and I didn’t know that would breed panic.

I didn’t know you’d torture me with my own mind, my fears, my shortcomings, drowning me in my lack of Faith.

I didn’t know I’d look like a cracked corpse whenever I stared into a mirror after the hundredth sleepless night.

You tortured me until the very end, until ecstasy in a house of God.

My reward?

To stare at my subconscious in the Lake from Montrose Beach’s shore and to finally see peace.

To stare at the gazebo from the Drake Hotel at 2am.

To walk North up Michigan Avenue with my parents and my wife feeling a phenomena I have known in a handful of other places: to see far ahead of myself for what the land truly is but to see something that isn’t physically there, but ethereally. To see the sword in the stone ahead.

To see that the dream is more real than life itself.

Nineteen months of unsettled, exhausted, and rootless torture came to a close.

Your heel finally removed from my trachea, and your mouth finally whispered in my ears the lesson I fought tooth and nail to not learn:

“God will provide.”

And now I have had to accept a cruel fate.

I am a man from San Francisco who would give his life to save it.

And those tugs on my heart I feel when I hear of the Golden Gate are those same tugs I now feel when I hear your name.

I have now had to accept a cruel fate that as I now leave you, I have learned that I love you.

I wish I had known this in my heart sooner, but if I had, I may have never left you as God wills.

It is not my fight to save you. This much is clear. I only came to you to rescue the princess and whisk her off to foreign lands.

But when I look at her, I see you.

Like her, despite intense spiritual suffering, you’ve guarded the light in your heart.

And like her,

you’re worth saving.

With love,

Arthur Constantine