Goodbye to the Chicago Intersection Where I Was Reborn
In August of 2022, I rode the purple line from Evanston into Chicago. I was going to Madison and Halsted. Madison and Halsted is a mythical place in my imagination. It’s the intersection where fifteen years prior, in 2007—after crashing my bicycle into an opening car door and banging my head on the pavement, unhelmeted—I rose from the ground, amnesiac, though I would not realize it right away. Right after the crash, I dusted myself off like nothing had happened and walked away. It was only a block or so later, when, as I stopped to look at the street signs, I realized I had lost my memory. Whatever existed before the accident was a giant, impenetrable unknown.
Unlike what you might assume, having amnesia was exultant and joyous. I lived in a continuous present where moment to moment everything unrolled, new. Sunlight fell on the street, wind blew, and the words for these things did not immediately come to me. I looked around in wonder, then remembered: This is sunlight, this is air. I was an adult woman with only the multiplying brightness of the future ahead of me. I never wanted my memory to return.
It would, eventually.
This intersection is the site of the largest happiness I have ever known, but it is also tinged with heartbreak. I had put off going back to that intersection of Madison and Halsted for many years, afraid that coming close to it would only deepen my grief over never being able to feel that rapture again. I had visited the intersection over many years in my mind, as I wrote about it in my memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, and as I lay on the couch, idly, daydreaming about amnesia.
That afternoon in 2022, I made my way to the intersection, riding the elevated train, then the bus. I sat, window-side, watching Chicago run by through the window, and all I could think about was how the trains and buses were the landscape of my twenties.
I remembered: On cold winter nights, I shivered on train platforms and bus stops, huddling under heat lamps, trying to will the buses to come. I asked strangers about their lives under those heat lamps. I stared in a hush at the sky, the flurry of snow coming and coming, under those heat lamps. There were the buses on New Year’s Eve, how happy we were to pay a penny for a ride, a little (or very) drunk, gleeful, cold. There were the trains after a big game, when someone always got on carrying a couple of six-packs and we passed beers back and forth, until everyone had one, the train car suddenly a party. I got robbed on these buses, everything taken from me, because I had fallen asleep. I tried to defend a person threatened with a knife on one of those trains, gave a blowjob to a boyfriend on another. I carried mace on those trains, thought idly about weapons, studied the emergency instructions for unlatching the windows. Once, a man sitting across the aisle, clearly just off work and wearing a trench coat, stared as tears fell silently down my face, then at the next stop he said, Okay, let’s get off and get you a drink. I was taken care of on those trains. By older Black women, who said, Sit down next to me, baby, when things got strange. The women of the city were my mother. I remembered—a friend had died recently when I was riding my bike before the car crash. I wasn’t close with him, but we were friendly. I had been distracted, thinking of death, how soon, how sudden it can come, just at the second when my life was stopped before an opening car door, before I learned that upheaval can be more wonderful than we can ever dare imagine.
Madison and Halsted is the most unremarkable city corner imaginable—with a Whole Foods that I don’t think was there before in one corner, a boxy building covered in sea-blue windows sitting before a high-rise, bullet-shaped and reaching into the sky in another, and a boarded-up Romanesque-revival building with tall arched windows covered in brown paper right across. I immediately recognized it as the strange urban whorl from which the new I had been born.
I thought about how the I prior to the crash had been a new immigrant, lost in the effort of fitting into American culture to the point of disappearing. I didn’t share about how my family left Colombia due to the violence in the 90s, or how I came from medicine people, or how often in my family we talked about ghosts.
“I had wanted the sparse landscape of amnesia, which felt like an upswell, an ecstasy, a radiant precarity of no-past and all-present, to last forever.”
After the crash, the amnesia lasted for eight wonderful weeks. Then, every morning I awoke, my brain had somehow retrieved a new memory during sleep. I had retrograde amnesia. Most people assume that in amnesia, memories are lost, gone, deleted, but what usually happens is that the memories are still there—it’s just that the neural connections to access them have been severed. In my case, the neural pathways to the stored islands of knowledge of my past were reformed during sleep, during dreams.
The more I remembered, the more heartbroken I felt. I had wanted the sparse landscape of amnesia, which felt like an upswell, an ecstasy, a radiant precarity of no-past and all-present, to last forever. I began remembering my childhood in Bogotá, with car bombs and kidnappings, and my mother and tías and tíos, with their dancing and stories of ghosts, and their making of plant medicine. I admired these new things I remembered and shed the impulse to hide them. I owe a lot to amnesia. It’s no exaggeration to say that I was born at that intersection.
I went into the Whole Foods to get a pastry and coffee, and sat, just as I did back then after the accident, to observe the world. I sat on a ledge by the grocery store, out of the way, and stared, not at the buildings themselves but the emotional heat map of the place.
“This intersection was both the end and the beginning of the world. I already knew that all that was possible was to be a transient visitor to that place.”
Cars idled, went, and for a few seconds, I could nearly taste what it was like to have amnesia again. I stared at one high rise, tall and strangely shaped so that it looked like a spaceship. I remembered looking up at that building and not understanding what the world was. The world was a place where such a strange building existed. Wisps of this past me kept appearing the longer I remained. It is a strange thing to love a Whole Foods, to love a sci-fi looking building, to love the shut look of a vacant boarded-up window. I wanted to stay there forever. But amnesia had already taught me that it wasn’t possible. This intersection was both the end and the beginning of the world. I already knew that all that was possible was to be a transient visitor to that place.
After an hour, when my body started to ache from sitting, I got up to leave. I love you, I love you, I said to the sidewalks. Second by second we grow our lives. Eventually, we need things like food, shelter, community. Leaving the intersection behind, I was holding on to the happy feeling of revisiting the old and new I, and I was also turning my mind to the future—to that evening, and what I would eat. Walking to the bus stop, I thought about how even and especially in upheaval, even and especially amidst the ruins of all our former lives, in the midst of chaos and at the edge of loss, there is a new world rising to meet us. Thank you, I love you, I said to the streets, my sight blurring. Soon I had climbed onto the bus, smiling to the window, to everything seen and unseen.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Both her memoir and debut novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, were winners of the California Book Award. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Zyzzyva, among others. She lives in California.
Read Ingrid’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Header photo by Ivan Aleksic.
Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
