The timer on the oven goes off, and I bring the journal with me into the kitchen. I set it down on the counter, grab a pair of oven mitts, and pull the sheet cake from the oven. I lightly press on the top, and it springs back.
“Perfect.”
I read over my list again. It’s unfiltered and raw and vulnerable, and there’s no one in my life I would share it with... but maybe that’s what makes it important.
Because maybe identifying the thingsIreally want is the first step.
And the next step is to actually do them.
Chapter 3
One month later
I slide the key in the lock of my new apartment but pause before I open the door.
I pull out my phone and open the camera app. With the apartment door in the background and the number 6 on the door clearly visible in the frame, I snap a photo and send it to Minnie with a caption that reads:I made it!
She’s doing a postgrad seminar at Oxford for a few months, but when I told her I was moving to Chicago, I swear I heard her cheer from the other side of the ocean.
She did make an offhanded comment that if I really want to “get my groove back,” I should move somewhere tropical and have a torrid affair with a Michael B. Jordan look-alike.
Minnie is twenty-three now, and I love that she’s old enough to be my friend, but some subjects are still just too weird to discuss with her. My nonexistent love life isdefinitelyone of them.
Finding my journal that night unlocked something in me. I finally understood what Dr. Baskin meant—nothing is going to change unless I change it.
So this is me. Changing it.
I’m terrified—but strangely excited.
Dr. Baskin told me once that bravery isn’t the absence of fear. It’s feeling the fear but doing the thing anyway.
This feels brave. It also feels a little crazy.
I secured the apartment before I even sold the house—something that happened in record time—and with Minnie’s help over FaceTime, we went through everything, keeping things we wanted and selling or donating everything else. It was sad, and hard, and stressful, and nostalgic.
I had my neighbor help me remove the trim piece where we’d marked Minnie’s varying heights so I could take it with me. That stuff was never important to anyone else, plus John’s mother hated that I marked up the trim.
I did it anyway. One tiny rebellion. It was—and still is—important to me.
Once we were done, and once I shut the door behind me for the last time, I felt... free.
I always wanted to live in Chicago. When I was in college, this city was always supposed to be my next step. After a twenty-four-year detour, I’ve finally arrived.
I’ve only seen the apartment in photos, and now that I’m here, I take it all in. It’s an end unit in a horseshoe-shaped brick building and there’s a beautiful courtyard in the center that’s clearly been well-tended. You’d never know that on the opposite side of the building is a partially obstructed, distant view of Lake Michigan and a close-up view of the skyscrapers that populate Chicago’s famous skyline.
My new apartment building, The Bexley, is only two stories tall, and each of the apartments has an exterior door facing the courtyard. Flower pots and welcome mats and benches and chairs are neatly positioned around the space, and there’s a patch of grass in the center, making the whole area social and private at the same time.
It’s the middle of March, not quite spring, and there’s a crispness in the air despite the sunshine beaming down into the courtyard.
I don’t know what I expect, but I’m struck by a wave of something that feels a lot like... possibility.
Well, that’s a feeling I haven’t felt in a long time.
My plan isn’t overly fleshed out. More of a loose outline.
Honestly, it’s still just number three on my list in my journal:“I want to live in a new city.”
It’s not even, like, 12 percent of a plan.
