Opening Sidework (5:00pm)
The times I’ve felt most inspired to write this have been while I polish wine glasses at work and watch the sunset just beyond the hedges on California Boulevard. I watch as traffic clusters and disperses and rush hour turns into dinner; as long, beautiful summer evenings cooled into crisp autumn afternoons. A longing for one thing replaces another. Snow is falling in big chunky flakes outside my window as I write this. The whole time, I stand in the same place. Water, glass, steam, linen.
The glass should be a clean, uninterrupted vessel between the wine and the deepest parts of your memory. It should hit your lips with undiluted expression and nostalgia, like a microphone for the voice of the land.
We often start dinner service with salsa music (I can remember, all too ironically, ‘En Barranquilla Me Quedo’ playing during my first shift back). I am transported by words and rhythm, each song reverberating against the glass into my chest. Each song evokes memories so strong it’s like I can feel the sun in my eyes again. I can smell almond trees. I look down and expect to find crushed mangos on sidewalks cracked with vines.
Standing at the bar, I have so often felt like I am in many places at once. It feels like a type of whiplash one experiences after being so intentionally in one place –– on an adventure brimming with emotion, and so undoubtedly alone in the most epic possible way. To be not just present but connected, embedded and intertwined with the world around me. So much so that even now, over six months since I left my sweltering apartment in Barranquilla, I can feel overwhelmed by the warmth and brightness of those memories. I bop my head to the music as I glide linen carefully down each glass stem. I can see myself dancing, covered in sweat, hand-in-hand with friends who are somehow both a world away and at the front of my mind.
The whole first half of last year feels like both a dream and the most real that life has ever been. I was a different person in that my personhood felt so untethered from the things that I once thought were signs that everything was where and how it was supposed to be. I surprised myself with my thirst for total anonymity, and my eagerness to toss aside the cloak of who I thought I was for so long. I reveled in this sort of existential nudity I never knew existed before. I bore my bare chest to the sky in search of answers and it only laughed back at me –– I realized that everything I needed, I already had.
I affirmed this unmistakable aliveness every day with gulps of warm air and mouthfuls of fresh fruit –– gifts from the land, just like wine.
It’s easy to overly romanticize these memories when I stand there, polishing the same glasses I polished the summer before I left for Colombia. It’s easy to hear salsa music and think about the freedom I felt catching buses to places I’d never been, rather than the days and weeks I spent wallowing in indecision and my deep-rooted fearfulness of hard truths. Feeling connected to the power of choice meant first experiencing the devastating heartbreak of waking up in a place I let the narrative choose for me, and realizing how far I’d strayed from my own desires. I didn’t even know what my desires were anymore.
I’m still not exactly where I always thought I’d be at this point in life. I do not have all of the things I thought I might have. There were so many times that coming back to Chicago felt like more of a crash landing than a rejoice. It felt like I was barely keeping my head above water in a thrashing tide of choices and decisions and consequences, choking on waves of old memories and emotions that I had tucked neatly away neatly to the edges of my peripheral vision. It made me realize just how unbelievably hard we have to fight every single day –– especially in this country –– just to prove to ourselves that we do, in fact, deserve to live the lives we desire. I can sometimes feel myself gripping the glass stems as I place them neatly in rows of four on the shelf, watching guests fill the restaurant and remembering that my next eight hours are in service to the pleasure and senses of people who I don’t even know. I sometimes feel dejected that my livelihood is so directly tied to my performance and their “generosity.” The grind, so aptly named, has a way of doing just that –– fractioning us into smaller, estranged pieces of ourselves.
And there’s always a moment where a choice becomes apparent. I know that I can take all of the anger and resentment into me, and I know that I will feel entirely justified in doing so. But today, even on January’s most frigid and gray afternoons, I am trying to choose to place the glass down gently. In this moment, observing these thoughts, I take a step outside the door, around the hedges to the corner of California and Logan Boulevards. I am reminded of all of the things I missed so dearly while I was gone –– the things that first made me fall in love with the practice of knowing a place. I watch bikers weave through traffic and see signs for art shows and protests and think about all of the places the train can take me. I watch people cross the street wrapped in layers of wool and remember that winter, too, comes to an end; and just as fast as I sold and packed everything I owned and hopped on a plane, I found myself back at this corner. Things look so similar but I couldn’t feel more different.
I have thought about how hilariously easy it would be to just start walking across the street and not look back. I could keep doing that over and over. I could treat my memories like a cartoon sunset and ride straight into it. Let the credits roll. Cowboys don’t have to clock in.
But I turn around. I hear my coworkers greeting guests, I remember my beautiful friends that I’ll meet up with after my shift. I remember how many times last year I wished that I could bottle up every moment of freedom I experienced and pop it open with them like champagne. I find so much strength in the people I am blessed to call my community. I do not feel like I am alone, struggling in a system that feeds off of our isolation. I do not yearn for how things used to be.
I pour wine, I clear plates. Dinner becomes dessert, we sweep, we drink beers while we count tips. I smile thinking about how one day, we will all experience a freedom that could never be contained by glass and cork. I feel grounded knowing that I am surrounded by people who truly give a shit about that, who share that dream for the world. I feel charged with a renewed belief in people and our collective ability to change things, despite how hard it seems like the powers that be work to tell us we can never win. I don’t care if that sounds stupid. Chicago taught me how to fight and how to love, how struggle leads to joy.
I forgot how good cold air feels in my lungs, how it tends to give me this sharpened clarity. I feel like I needed that bite, that sting, to be able to write this. I realized at some point I had to reject the idea that I should write an “ending” to this time in my life, to 2023, that I needed to create a “before” and an “after.” I never wrote an ending to this because there is no ending. I refuse to believe that adventure cannot exist alongside discipline. While my feet feel firmly planted in the reality of my life today and all of the responsibilities that come with it, I’m no longer buying this idea that thriving in this world necessitates the displacement of my own dreams. There are fewer rules than we think. There is enough time for everything.
Now, a full revolution away from what felt like the most important year of my life so far, the dust between “then” and “now” has settled. I see my reflection, clear as day, in clean glasses. In 2024, I am empowered by the peacefulness of my present day, the inevitable opportunities for everything to change, and the knowledge that the choice is mine, always.
