The Secret Window: Notes from a Chicago Morning

The windows here are high. Above me, the sky is doing that particular Chicago thing where it's neither dark nor bright — a light fog laid over everything, a smoky haze sitting on the water. Out past the glass, Lake Michigan holds exactly one sailboat. Soldier Field sits in the distance, quiet today, though recovering from the days the World Cup crowds fill the stadium.

Behind me: a mural of a stag standing among flowers, all color against everything else that's muted. Blackstreet plays on the speakers. The rafters above are painted an opaque black, round dome lights set into them, and the floor is granite tile — clean, but not shiny. Nothing here is trying too hard. It doesn't need to.

I'm here with Cory, a photographer who calls me Miss Kim and teaches me slang. I'm beginning to get fluent — I got you. Hit me. We're poppin. I say it back wrong and he laughs and corrects me, patient the way you are with someone you've decided to like. We're looking out over what used to be the Robert Taylor Homes — torn down now, the families who lived there scattered across the city — directly across from Dunbar High School, the same halls that once held Jennifer Hudson, Mr. T, Lou Rawls. Ordinary lives that became extraordinary ones, in the shadow of industrial bar lights that don't care either way.

It's the kind of place that makes you think about what gets remembered and what gets erased, and how thin the line is between the two. Cory noticed I still write on real paper, ballpoint pen on Moleskine, and there was something in the way he watched me do it — like it was a small act of defiance. Resisting the digital age. He told me about a friend of his, a calligrapher, who says writing is like building a chord progression, and now makes a living designing fonts inspired by ordinary life. Cory took a photo to send to his dad. I don't know why that detail is the one that stayed with me, except that it felt like watching someone else's quiet devotion.

Here's the truth of the morning, though, underneath all of it: I've been working harder than I've ever worked on anything, and the results haven't come. Not the way I hoped. Not yet. My partner reminded me what I know in my brain, but sometimes forget in my heart, fidelity is building each other up. Progress is steady and slow, not dramatic. Standing in that room with the mural and the fog and the lake, I found myself wondering how you unlock it — the mysterious alchemy of success, the secret window that turns poetry and choices and scar tissue into something people actually see. Into stained glass instead of dusty panes.

I don't have a tidy answer. What I have is this: the view, the mural, Cory's slang lessons, the sound of a pen on paper that somebody noticed. And the reminder — the one I keep having to give myself — that what matters isn't the followers or the Amazon rankings. What matters is showing up to take the next step forward, carrying my pink sparkle shoes even on the mornings I don't feel inspired at all.

Then I watched a butterfly land on a hanging planter and I knew. I can do it again tomorrow.

Are you creating? ✦