Dear Chicago,

              A SoundCloud remix of Frank Sinatra’s My Kind of Town bellows out of the car’s stereos as we barrel down Lake Shore Drive. I can feel my smile sparkle with the diamond grit of a night out in the city. Eden screams in Evan’s car: Is that Gray and Mortimer? We laugh. They do too. Manipulating the congested city lanes, they speed off, and we chase them. Time feels briefly arrested. Across the windshield, I can only see fuzzy streams of red car lights, bo- dega overheads, and skyscraper windows. The headlights crunch all the street light colors up and make them sting. I sway my arms out the car window back and forth like this. And Mortimer copies me.

              It’s 10pm, later that same early-April Chicago night, and Evan pulls into the gas station at the corner of LaSalle and Clark. He gets out of the car while Eden sings Chance the Rapper from the back seat. Chicago’s windy- city air sings with her. My front seat window is half-open.

              A man strides up to our car. From the few seconds that I see him, he’s about 20 years old, and he’s sporting a black hooded Nike zip-up. Look, Eden, a man is helping Evan with the gas tank, I say. As she laughs, I hear Evan shout from outside of the car, Hey man, chill... I turn my head, and the man has extended his arm through the win- dow. I look closer. He has a gun in his hand. His gun is in my face.

              GIVE ME ALL YOUR SHIT!

              Life and death get reduced to seconds. I hear echoes of my parents telling me that everything but my life is re- placeable. In an alternate reality, I fail to act quickly and calmly, and things go south. Instinctively, I wrestle the strap of my purse from the strap of my seatbelt and tell Samantha and Eden to throw their wallets, purses, and phones at me from the back seat. Eden grabs my hand, and Samantha screams. He takes our stuff and runs off into an alley. I winnow my focus down to the simple memory of my long drives down LSD. The fluorescent depths of my swollen city backyard lured me back. This is not who Chicago is. I know that. Time stands still.

              They say during accidents, moments are magnified — brought into achingly clear focus – but months later, I am still struck by my composure that evening. Wasn’t I supposed to freeze in terror when confronted with a loaded gun? Why didn’t my mind jump to fight or flight mode? From being able to tell the difference between fireworks and gunshots to knowing to walk with a key between my fingers to surviving gas-station robberies, I guess I’ve been training my whole life to navigate even the most chaotic city-kid moments.

              But, internally, I still feel the innocence of childhood. I now realize that my desire to be sophisticated and courageous is compatible with the playfulness of a youth spent seeing who can swing the highest, playing dress-up, dancing until I would get dizzy, crying LEMONADE from my street corner, chasing the neighborhood bunny down the street, and singing Disney karaoke with Troy and Gabriella on my TV. Behind my coat of armor there is an inner version of myself that is playful and always still learning.

              My hardened home is softened with summers at Grant Park, Go, Cubs, Go chants, silver beans, and drives downtown.

              It’s eight months later, and we’re back in Evan’s car. Snow has replaced wind, sealed windows have replaced their half-opened counterparts, but we are the same. As we drive down Lake Shore Drive as we always do, we are having fun. The vitality tucked within our adolescent hearts cannot be vanquished so easily. We are kids, and this is just what we have to do: persist.

              With the undaunted wind at my back and the world in my arms, I chase the sky.