Previously: I walked to the square and sat on the steps beneath the phallic Illinois Centennial Monument…Belmont pointed at my waist. “Why you got a jacket on a hot day like this?”…Why stay in Chicago? … because I like standing on the overpass at the Ashland El stop and looking at the skyline at night, because sometimes I like feeling small and pointless.
Take it from the top:
fernweh (fern-way) n.
1. An ache for distant places
2. Being homesick for anywhere but home
The two of us sat and stared. Ana slumped to the side, eyes away from me, while I faced straight ahead. With Ana fogging the passenger side window with her sleep-breath, I thought about a friend from back home, Ernest, who I hadn’t thought about in years, and I wondered where he was and what he was up to.
The last time I saw him he was twelve, maybe thirteen; I was fifteen. It was late summer. I woke up one Saturday morning and there he was, sitting on our porch looking west over our restored prairie. He was smart to come and sit there in the stillness of the morning. It was a great place. There was lighting on the horizon, a storm was going to hit midmorning.
“Good morning, Jackson.”
“Hey, Ernest. When did you get here?”
“I don’t know, maybe an hour ago, I guess.” “Just sittin’?”
“Yeah.”
“Sittin’s good sometimes.”
“This is my favorite place to sit.”
“It’s a good place.”
“Hey, we’re going to move, you know.”
“Really? Where?”
“Denver, where there’s all the mountains.”
“Denver? Do you have family there? Why Denver?”
“My mom wants the mountains. She says she feels like she’s just going to blow away here.”
“What about your dad?”
“What about him?”
“How does he feel?”
“I don’t know. He sits in the bathroom a lot. Why do you think he does that, Jackson?”
“I don’t know. He just sits in the bathroom?”
“Yeah. Why do you think he does that?”
“I don’t know. Is he sick?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“He’s pretty old.”
“Yeah, I guess he’s pretty old. Hey Jackson, will you come visit me in Denver?”
“Maybe Ernest. Denver is kind of far.”
“It is? How far?”
“I don’t know. Far. Pretty far.”
We could hear the thunder now. Faint but certain. Coming.
“But how far?”
“Far far. Like, I don’t know, two days drive.”
“Two days?”
“Maybe, I don’t know.”
“I hope you come visit me.”
“I hope so, too. But you’ll make other friends. You’ll probably forget about me.”
“No way! You’re my best friend. We have so much fun.”
“You’ll have fun in Denver.”
“I know. I already know that I’m going to make friends. When I get there, I can tell them anything about me. They don’t know anything, so I can tell them something and they’ll believe it because they’ve just met me. So when I get there I’ll tell them that my dad works for the army and goes on secret missions and sometimes he takes me on the secret missions because the bad guys never suspect that a kid could do anything so I’m the perfect spy, but I won’t tell them anymore than that, because it’s all top secret.”
“But you don’t go on secret missions. What about when your new friends find out?”
“I can just say it’s all part of the secret.”
“Maybe just be yourself.”
“People always say that. I don’t want to be myself, I want to be somebody else.”
“I don’t think it works like that.”
“How does it work?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you always be yourself?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if you’re yourself?”
“I don’t know, Ernest. Look, I gotta feed these animals before the storm comes.”
“There’s a storm coming?”
“Shit, Ernest, what does it look like?”
He and his family got in their station wagon and moved to Denver the following weekend. The day before they left, Ernest came to the house to see me one last time and to leave me his new address and phone number. I wasn’t home, but my mom promised that she would give me the message and tell me that he said goodbye. She did, but I never visited. Never wrote. Never called. Never talked to Ernest again.
Thank you for reading. Next week starts like this:
I left Belmont and went back to my apartment.
Then Jackson watches television in an attempt to quiet his brain.