a love letter to chicago's bitter winter

On New Years Eve 2023, I spent all day outside. For a few hours, I was making breakfast sandwiches in one of the parking lots at Soldier Field. Then, for another couple hours I was standing at the very top of the stadium watching the Bears play football. It wasn’t supposed to snow that day, but it snowed from the moment we started tailgating until the moment we finally got back inside our apartments, where we shed our two layers of pants, two pairs of socks and let our blood flow back into our toes. I had stuck hand warmers in my boots before we went in, and the snow soaked through the jacket I was wearing that day. My two best friends from back home in California, who had moved to Chicago a few years after I did remember that day as fondly as I do. All three of us were born and raised in the Bay Area, where I can’t recall ever experiencing a temperature lower than 30 degrees. My family will ask me how the weather is here on a random day in January and groan when I give them the answer, then they will insist I must miss the weather back home. I could never explain it to anyone who hasn’t lived here, that I’ve never been homesick for California’s winter.

As I write this, my bedroom window is open and I’m letting the cool air wake my brain up. I’ve been inside all day, accompanied by warm air and warm coffees while the grey skies consume every window. Winter makes me tired when I run away from it, but on bitter cold nights with friends as we complain about our ears aching from the freezing temperatures, I feel like I fully belong in this body I’ve been given. There’s no where for my mind to wander on cold nights, it has to stay with me at all times. The bitter winters give us something to commiserate about, it gives us something to feel collectively. How do I explain to someone who hasn’t walked a mile in negative temperatures that fifty degrees with cloudy skies for months on end makes me feel dead inside? It makes me feel tired. It makes me look to my phone for a dopamine rush.

California winters were some of the least creative periods of my life. Here, I can flush the clouds out of my brain by stepping out of my front door with just a t-shirt and sweats. I can sit by an open window and feel my nose start to sting. I can feel the moisture in my eyes start to burn. Chicago’s air in the winter time is a restart button, a stimulant without a devastating crash. And we get it for free, in a million different forms.

I went home for a week in December, and I walked around San Francisco alone and felt so depressed. I missed having to put intention into going outside. I felt homesick for the mad rush to take off all my layers as soon as I stepped inside a building.

Just a month after my eighteenth birthday I saw my first Chicago snow day. From my college campus I got on the Brown Line and sat along the window just to see for the first time what a city covered in snow might look like. I hadn’t figured out how to dress quite yet — my warmest coat was Uniqlo down jacket that was about a quarter of an inch thick. I didn’t own a pair of wool socks yet and my “winter boots” were just a pair of black rain boots. On a really cold day, a friend and I walked around the river just to see it frozen over. We had no money, so we couldn’t find a place to loiter for free except for outside. My friend was from Indiana and felt these cold winters his whole life. Our fingers ached the same when we got back on the train to return to campus. Eighteen more years of experience doesn’t change the way humans feel the cold. And I always explain to my relatives back home that I can’t tell the difference between 10 and -10 sometimes — it’s just fucking cold!

In the weeks of wind chills and ice patches, I only miss a warmer season that follows this one. I miss a humid eighty degrees, jumping into Lake Michigan in July. When I hit the water, and it swallows me up to the very top of my head, and my hair floats up to the surface, I remember January. I don’t think as a young teenager that I would have ever said I preferred the cold, but maybe some part of my biology needed it to finally feel happy. While thinking about the Chicago winter, I tried to recall anytime where I felt something comparable back home. I did feel similarly grateful for a temperature shocking me to my senses on the days I would be lucky enough to run into the Pacific Ocean. Those were the days I felt like I had really lived.