I first saw the beautiful houses from the window of my English classroom. The baseball and football fields rolled out below and just past the scoreboard there stood a row of four or five Victorians in a spread of pastel colors. They were unlike the pastels I’d seen in the Florida Keys or the Jersey Shore, which had a sickly saturation, like Pepto or toothpaste. These were appropriate colors for the Midwest that could recede into the grey palette of winter. They were pretty.
From where I stood, four stories up and a football field away, the houses reminded me of the model railroad at the Museum of Science and Industry, where the train snakes away from downtown Chicago and through towns where tiny people hang laundry in their backyards. It was strange to acknowledge that these houses had been there for my first three years of high school. I just hadn’t noticed them before.
I was a few months into 17 and had begun trekking into Chicago from the suburbs most weekends, my surroundings gathering detail as I prepared to apply to college. But discovering these houses reversed all of that progress, and instead I realized my world was remarkably small, with swathes of unrendered territory steps from school.
Over the course of the spring, I began noticing new houses everywhere. It felt impossible that there could be so many beautiful things I had never noticed before—like they popped into place when I wasn’t paying attention, until I grew older and curious and needed to fill in the scenery around me. How could I know so little about the place I’d lived my whole life? What had I been looking at all this time?
***
My hometown of Oak Park, Illinois is directly adjacent to Chicago. It’s primarily known for two exports: Ernest Hemingway, who hated Oak Park, and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who didn’t. Hemingway grew up there, left after high school, and never really wrote about our shared hometown. Wright, a transplant, spent two decades there and left his fingerprints all over town in a crop of modernist buildings that includes the church where my parents were married. Thousands of tourists visit each year to wander the grooves of those fingerprints.
Oak Park is idyllic in warm seasons. The trees gather above the street, whispering to each other like children on the playground. Growing up, I chased soccer balls in parks filled with wildflowers. I took art lessons in a carriage house. In fourth grade, I visited Wright’s studio on a field trip, but all I remember of that day is skipping back to school with my friends. As the setting of my childhood, Oak Park was unremarkable, because it was all I knew.
I applied to a scholarship in Hemingway’s name that was awarded to one Oak Park junior each year. In my application, I wrote, “I don’t want to go to college in a suburb like Oak Park.” I was afflicted at the time with the same condition as most teenagers, no matter where they grew up: the desire to get out and never look back. Maybe I sounded too much like Hemingway, because I did not win the scholarship, but I did leave Oak Park.
***
I’m reminded of those beautiful houses three years later when, rather than living off campus for the first time, I’m waiting out a pandemic at my parents’ house. In my boredom, I’ve begun taking long walks across the empty town. The houses in Oak Park now look massive to me, accustomed to the grimy apartments and overcrowded houses of college students. I’m struck by the same feeling: that I don’t really know my hometown. But I want to.
Knowing that I won’t enter anyone else’s home for the foreseeable future, those houses allure me. My parent’s house sits awkwardly on its plot, flanked by two slivers of side yard, dingy with its mustard yellow siding. But more than any aspect of its appearance, it feels like a lesser house because it’s mine. I know each creaky spot on the stairs, loose cabinet handle, and broken baseboard. Those other houses might have the same imperfections, but I wouldn’t know. I haven’t seen inside them.
***
As a kid, I slipped into pretend easily. With a shift in perspective, my house could become a Victorian-era boarding school, Clara’s mansion from The Nutcracker, or a safari full of lions feeding on tasseled throw pillows. During the day, my dolls were often the conduits for my daydreams. I had a Fischer Price dollhouse marketed as the “Loving Family Dollhouse.” It came with stickers to illustrate that claim: muffins baking in the oven, a tea set in the living room, horse riding boots and ribbons in the daughter’s bedroom. The family of dolls that came with it had stiff, chunky joints and painted faces. They looked frumpy next to my Polly Pockets and Barbies, who rented rooms at the dollhouse, sleeping in the attic or makeshift loft apartments.
Although these stories played out in the bodies of the dolls I held, I find it hard to remember them ever speaking to each other, moving their limbs, or bouncing along my carpet. Instead, I remember the way they felt, the things they couldn’t say out loud. Instead, I remember the act of pretending. My parents told me that once, they heard voices in my room in the middle of the night. When they opened my door, they found me sitting on the floor talking to myself, dolls in hand.
***
At 17, I was better at keeping my pretending quiet, but in bed at night, I imagined a braver shadow of me, who acted on her impulses and didn’t apologize. Her existence sustained me through days of feeling like a background character in my own life.
My passivity was most apparent when it came to the friend I’d been pining over since sophomore year gym class, to whom I had not expressed my feelings. G was a tomboy in the purest sense of the word: short hair, perpetually in hoodies and sweatpants, a goalie on the lacrosse team. And although her sexuality was unconfirmed, I was certain she was queer.
The first time I noticed her was in the school swimming pool during gym class. From underwater, I watched her swim back and forth, graceful movements from a strong and sure body, her hair suspended in chlorinated turquoise. Moments later, clinging to the tiled pool edge, I felt a crush seeping into the pit of my stomach.
We started hanging out that summer, often at her house, another old Victorian but with a meticulous garden. In those early stages of our friendship, we built between us a strange intimacy that could be construed as platonic, though it did not feel that way to me. We gripped hands watching horror movies. We laid on the floor of her bedroom with our shirts half off, not touching. Sometimes I wondered if I was imagining it all, imbuing her actions with an interest they did not contain.
My friends wanted me to tell G that I liked her. They drew up plans and schemes to manufacture my confession. From the stories I told them, they were sure she felt the same way. But as my crush stretched out from a couple of months to a couple of years, they stopped asking.
It wasn’t that I never planned to act. I just grew content with not knowing. I wanted to hold onto the ambiguity of our arms touching when we sat next to each other on the floor of the gym, rather than learn what it all meant. Instead of expressing my feelings candidly, I became bold: joking that I was in love with her, asking her friends if she liked girls, inching a pinky toe past the line of platonic deniability. She brushed these advances off and I imagined that she, too, was trying to preserve what was happening to us.
***
This pandemic summer, daydreaming is difficult. The way I operate in the world is changing so quickly: no longer going outside except for aimless walks around an empty world, no friends standing within six feet of me, no romantic prospects. Each daydream is dampened by the restrictions of reality and the uncertainty that those restrictions will ever draw back. This summer, my life is so static that I return to crafting stories of other people whose lives are still moving forward—people who haven’t been pulled away from everything to live in their parents’ house in the suburbs. I watch two European boys on the internet traverse their country to be together and fall in love. It feels, as it did when I was 17, like this will never happen to me. I fall asleep at night writing their dialogue in my head. For the first time, I’m bored with the subject matter of my own life.
On my walks, I find my favorite house in town. It’s a teal and orange Victorian in the Stick style—a predecessor to the famous Queen Anne, distinct for the strips of wood board that break the exterior into rectangles or triangles. I spend several days replicating the house in the video game The Sims, but when I finish the exterior, I find that I have no desire to furnish the house. What I made is a perfect recreation of what I can see from outside, but any further contribution would be an act of imagination. I’ll never know which side of the house the staircase sits on or what color the guest bathroom is painted or whether the basement is finished. I’ll never know the family that lives there. I’ll never step inside. I’m confronted with the refusal of my imagination to complete the fantasy.
Though it stalls during the day, my mind has no problem constructing new scenes in my sleep. I dream one night of leaving at midnight to bike to G’s house. I don’t know why I’m going over there, even as I sit on my front porch waiting for her to text me back. I’m sure she isn’t actually inviting me over and expect her to cancel or backtrack, but she doesn’t. When I arrive outside her house, ten minutes from mine, I feel impossibly far from home. The urge to leave rises abruptly in my chest and I wake up panicked. I turn over and over in my covers, rolling the dream away.
***
The night of the Fourth of July, I’m biking home from my friend Lauren’s backyard. I pass a manhole cover in an intersection and hear the water whooshing ten feet below. The fireworks are especially loud this year—maybe people making the most of a disappointing holiday—and they rattle around the sky.
The wind picks up at my back and I cruise past a house with a warmly lit porch and a chair swing. For a moment, I’m 17. I’m wearing my dad’s Hawaiian shirt and it hangs to my knees. I’m leaning onto my two best friends, awash in the warmth of early fall. I’m texting G to see if I can come over later. I’m pretending it’s for the chili her mom made. We probably both know it’s to see her. I have not kissed her and she has not stopped talking to me.
It’s a false memory, a composite I might have thought up before bed once, but it tastes so real that my eyes water. This is the teenage experience I imagine myself in: football games and unrequited crushes and spending more time with my friends than anyone else. It didn’t really happen like that and I know this, yet it is such a bright spot in this dull summer to misremember these things.
At 20, I’m on the precipice of my adult life, aware that my time in the story of Oak Park is about to end. This is the last summer I’ll spend here. If, on the first day of September, everything reset and I became a teenager again, I don’t know how angry I would be. I want to experience fall at home again: Saturday afternoons when everyone is bustling through downtown Oak Park, when you catch your breath on the soccer field and the air burns your chest, when you sit in a car parked outside your house and talk for 45 minutes about everything in the world before going inside and watching your friend drive away. This world still feels as small as it did when I left for college, except now it’s comforting to see the boundary lines from my bedroom window.
If I cling onto every porch in town, adulthood will have to drag me away, my nails digging paint off the wood. Oh, how I love the stories where nothing really happens. No conflict resolved, no crush requited nor unrequited, no loose ends tied and knotted. Me, forever suspended in the daydream that is always the hour before the first kiss, when I’ve done nothing to warrant being iced out. I’ve done nothing at all.
***
But in real life, I couldn’t pause the scene. It was the fall of senior year. We were laying in her bed like we always did when we hung out. It was the bottom of a bunk bed, so most of the time it felt like a fort, swaddling us in a smaller version of the world where we lay near each other, where I said things that straddled the line of friendship. But this day, it was claustrophobic. She was saying things that made my chest hurt, like, “I think I might be bisexual” and “Do you remember when you said you were in love with me?” It was like something had lifted, the padlock on her tongue that kept her from saying what she meant. But I didn’t know how to handle her newfound honesty.
“Do you get what I’m saying?” she asked finally.
“Maybe,” I squeaked.
“Do you want to do something about it?” she prodded, and I wondered when that became my prerogative.
“OK,” I said after a pause. I sat up and as soon as I did it, it felt like the wrong thing to do. She followed my lead — Oh god, why am I the one leading? — as I leaned my face in and closed my eyes and prayed my spatial awareness was good enough to find her mouth. And we kissed. For a few seconds. It was something. As in, our mouths definitely touched. Her tongue found its way into my mouth for a second or two. It didn’t feel how I thought it would. Pop music didn’t play in my head. My body felt as tense as it did before. I didn’t have an epiphany about the wonders of kissing.
But one thing that did happen was that when we lay back down, suddenly I had so much to say. I told her everything I couldn’t for the past year and a half. All the times I tried to flirt with her and she rejected it in her blunt, sarcastic way. A handful of photos of myself crying over her. People I had told about my crush: friends of mine, friends of hers, people I hoped might tell me she liked me too. She asked, “do you want this to be something?”
Relishing my role as the experienced queer, who knows better than to force her into a relationship minutes after coming out to someone for the first time, I said, “let’s just see what happens.”
When we left her room, we passed her mom on the stairs and I felt giddy that she didn’t know what we’d been up to. When I biked home, there was a whooshing feeling throughout my body.
***
I waited two days to tell my friends about the kiss. I savored the feeling of having a secret, sharing it with her for a fleeting moment. I wrote a poem that compared it to the feeling of dust falling in sunlight.
In gym class on Monday, I waited to see her walk in. I was ready to follow her lead on how we acted about this. Would she come over to me immediately, a softness evident in our interactions? Or would she give me a wave, approach me at the end of class? But neither happened. She walked in and didn’t look at me.
I composed myself. I was prepared to give her time. I told myself she was scared of coming out, that she was in the midst of rearranging her understanding of herself like I had done two years before. I texted her a few times about doing homework together on the weekends and she was always busy. She still wouldn’t make eye contact in gym class. I begged her to meet me at a sandwich shop to talk and she relented.
We sat in the back of the store for privacy. I ate my sandwich and studied her body language: closed off, detached. I couldn’t find her in her face at all. I also couldn’t find the napkins and under the table, I rubbed my salt-crusted fingers together. I asked, “So what happened?” and she feigned ignorance, replying in a cold voice, “With what?”
All I had to do was restate everything, elaborate in clear words what she already knew—that I liked her, that I wanted this to continue—but I couldn’t do it. A doubt crept in that she wasn’t scared of what happened between us. She regretted it. And when I told her everything I felt, it was too much. My hands moved anxiously under the table.
As I walked away from the sandwich shop that day, something tightened inside me. My years of inaction haunted me not because I regretted them, but because her actions threw us into embarrassing contrast. The plausible deniability seeped away and I was just a loser, content to live forever off crumbs of affection.
We didn’t speak for the rest of high school. She never invited me over again. I moved to college on the East Coast and she to the West.
***
On one of my circuitous walks around Oak Park, when summer construction sends me on a detour, I end up on the block across from my high school, the one with the multicolored Victorians I remember so distinctly. But it’s not how I remember it: the block has only one Victorian, which is white. The rest of the houses are unremarkable. My memory, deceptively solid, slides out of the way and reveals its true face, like the false front of a building made for a movie set. Nothing behind it. Whatever happened to me that day, gazing from the classroom window, was not the houses’ doing.
***
Some nights, I bike home past the house where my first kiss occurred. I’ve often passed G’s block over the years on the way to friends’ houses, the coffee shop, the library. Each time I slow at that stop sign, I have a choice to make: do I detour down her block, peer at her house in hopes of spotting something through a window that indicates her presence? Or do I stay on the path I’m on, the one that deviated from hers that day when I left the sandwich shop?
Since it shut on me for good, I’ve forgotten what her house looks like inside. Back then, wherever I was in the world, I was first and foremost in my own head, a monologue of my anxieties perpetually on air. I didn’t possess the ability to stay in the moment: too busy analyzing her body language to notice the color of her bedroom walls. After all, what interested me most in that house was her.
There was something she said that I often forgot when re-telling myself the story of my first kiss: she heard a rumor that I had a crush on her in the first year of our friendship. She had known the whole time. Whether it made her uncomfortable or curious, I don’t know, because she kept inviting me to her house. She kept giving me chances to do something about it and I kept holding those moments too tenderly, petrified of the idea of our friendship ending—which, of course, it did anyway.
My version of events hinged on the confession I unleashed on her after the kiss. I believed she had changed her mind at that moment, when she learned how I felt: too much. It was the simplest explanation for the stone wall of her face. I had reasons to believe that wasn’t the case—a mutual friend who said she asked about me; the apology text she sent just before graduation—but this seemed less conclusive than the way I felt sitting across from her with my grubby hands, stunned by her silence.
Over the entire course of our friendship, now that I think about it, I never understood her. Even now, I’m guessing at intentions. It used to be easier to paint these guesses into a complete picture: she was scared to disrupt our friendship, just like I was. Now, as we get older, lives diverged from Oak Park, I know there’s more to her, like there’s more to me.
All I have is the tangible facts of our friendship, a few years truncated by something I was trying to avoid. Afternoons in her basement watching movie after movie. Racing home from 7-11. Eating ice cream from the pint. Letting half of it pool at the bottom because I didn’t want to leave the room to put it in the freezer. Skinning both my knees in a failed piggyback ride. Texting her for help with physics homework, which she gave begrudgingly. Practicing kayak rescues in the school pool as she accused me of trying to drown her, hair pasted to her forehead when she emerged to the surface. Inviting her to stay for dinner with my parents. Her telling me how nice it was because her family never eats dinner together.
“I really liked hanging out with you,” read the text she sent me the month before we graduated, “I’m sorry I fucked things up.” I still don’t know what that means, whether she wanted to be friends again or something else. We spent two years walking in circles and I never got close enough to the center to see her. Another threshold in Oak Park that I’ll never cross.
***
Biking home one night, I cross most major streets hardly slowing down, the highway buzzing faintly a mile away. It’s 9 pm and the cicadas serenade me. I’m heading back to college in a few days and I’ve been crying all week about leaving Oak Park. I didn’t cry when I left for college the first or second year, but something has changed. I’ve spent five months living here, the longest since high school, and grown terribly re-attached. The thought of living alone in a city during the most isolating event of my life has turned me back into the child who wept in her bunk at summer camp.
To my surprise, for the first time in months, my imagination kicks in. The houses I pass are lit in one or two windows, often a living room or kitchen, sometimes an upstairs bedroom where I picture a teenager hunched over a notebook, scribbling fervently. At one house, a bathrobed figure pauses at the bottom of the staircase in an Edward Hopper scene. At others, the window contains the smaller, brighter square of a television, flashing through indistinguishable images. Framing all of this—the windows and the street I’m biking down—are the trees, leaning into each other like old friends.
I’ve always thought of high school as a time when life was happening to everyone but me, a waiting period that I survived only through daydreaming. But this summer, forced into stagnancy and infected by nostalgia, I’m struck by the emotional richness of those years, playing out inside homes that were only as beautiful as the meaning I read into them. I know I’m not leaving Oak Park forever, but I don’t think it will look the same when I return. My adult life is about to unpause, dissolving whatever magic I found in the Victorians, including my own.
My bike light, strapped to my handlebars, casts a shadow-me, pedaling parallel on the pavement. She races me, pumping her legs faster, then flies off and disappears into the oak trees.
