Coincidence is another word for

I am moving to Chicago in August. How strange to put those letters together. I am moving to Chicago to start an MFA program, to make art full-time for 21 months.

Last fall I applied to a number of schools aiming, like the rest of the visual art-inclined 20-something spectrum, at a range of 3 or 4 institutions. At the time I was optimistic, I had worked hard. I put things in a row— jobs, references, images lined up like dominos in a slide carousel that I spent two days tracking down from photo store to photo store. Then the skinny transluscent envelopes began to arrive seeming to tell me that I had been insane to think that I was ever cut out for becoming an artist. I had a moment where all I could think was that I spent the last 3 years making an hourly wage roughly equivalent to my high school lifeguarding paycheck, with inflation. And now I am a 28 year-old adult with credit card debt, callused palms, and a phenomenal child care and Xerox maintenance resume.

The Art Institute of Chicago sent a big envelope but I was still sour on rejection. I wanted to shake myself into optimism but the printed reality of school loans and leaving home left me foggy. I kept thinking of the Groucho Marx quote at the beginning of Annie Hall—I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members. I knew I needed to see things in a different light but I was having trouble getting there.

I took a plane a few weeks ago to try to envision a new life at the Art Institute and in the streets and buses and trains of the grid. One of my closest friends, Caroline, lives in Chicago, so it was a warm visit. She took me in, drove me from neighborhood to neighborhood to try to get my bearings. I walked over to a train stop which was an elevated wooden platform. It felt like a boardwalk, but it was windy and grey and caught up between streets. I took the train downtown to the tall buildings and tried to imagine myself spending days on these platforms instead of underground. I visited the printshop which was expansive, there were huge windows circling the presses, looking out at the lake. An undergraduate critique was in progress and the work looked pretty spread out on large wood tables. I met several professors and some graduate students. I began to feel more at home.

Caroline, my friend of 14 years, works in the music industry. On Saturday night we went to see a band in her management list. I had never heard of the band and directly on entrance I realized the mean age of the audience was fourteen or fifteen. I was given a backstage sticker for my jacket and we climbed up to a pocket of seats on stage right. Below us a blanket of teens swayed a little waiting for the show to start. The lights were on and I felt mesmerized overlooking the crowd of heads, people pushing slightly to edge to the front. Then the band hit its first note and there was screaming that filled up the entire theatre. I wanted ear plugs. The band came out wearing black, with hair standing up. The keyboardist spasmed behind his keyboard stand. The teens screamed and jumped and then began crowd surfing. I watched girls in belly-baring shirts being sent forward over dozens of hands toward the stage. At the front, a row of bouncers picked off the surfers one by one in WWF grips. Then the surfers would run around to the back of the theatre to try to squeeze up again.

The next day Caroline and I went to brunch in another neighborhood. We were walking into the restaurant and someone said my name, but I kept talking to Caroline assuming my anonymity in this new city. He said my name again and I looked up to recognize one of the professors from the print department at the Art Institute. He was kind and seemed honestly happy to run into me. I thought of some graffiti I spotted in Berlin which said Coincidence is another word for synchronicity. Then I wondered if my thought patterns were beginning to be shaped like a hippie granola mom.

Chicago is a foreign city to me. It spreads out because there are no boundaries. Restaurants give space between tables, bars sink back into buildings football-field deep, room after room. The houses aren't connected, they just brush up close to eachother. The ocean isn't in view.

When I think about leaving New York I am scared and I want to cry and crawl back into my life here. I know I am going to miss so many tiny things, and the bigger shape and sound of the city. But I've made the decision to hand myself over to this new place and find my niche, and see where I find myself at the other end.