In a beauty contest pitting Chicago’s neighborhoods against each other, Goose Island wouldn’t exactly make the top ten. She might have some great insights to share during the interview competition—about the amazing beer brewed on her shores, or the fact that she’s the only island on the Chicago River—but even an evening gown couldn’t hide her homely features.

Nevertheless, I found myself walking around there the other week, around those streets flagged with banners proudly reading “Chicago’s Industrial Corridor,” in order to find Calumet Photo. It was there that a bespectacled guy named Fred taught me how to use my new Yashica Mat 124, loaded it up with a roll of Tri-X, and sent me out to capture the world on medium format film.

Unable to contain my excitement, I shot my test roll there without the guidance of a light meter. Somehow, the gritty black-and-white film, the striking square frames, and the eerie emptiness of the neighborhood made for some pretty cool shots. I can’t wait to see what else this thing can do!

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As I began my senior year of college—you know, when the only thought on anybody’s mind is “What’s next?”—I thought I had it all figured out. I’d be swooping myself right back to Chicago as soon as I removed my cap and gown, and that seemed to be that. I told my friends and roommates on every occasion that that the subject came up.

But somewhere between first and second semester, seeds of doubt were planted in my mind. I started tuning my ear to a weird internal dialogue that stemmed from a combination of outside influences and my own strange insecurities: “Isn’t the East Coast more cosmopolitan than the Midwest?” “Am I boring for wanting to return to the place where I was born?” Both statements look ridiculous on paper, of course, but can be strangely powerful when played over and over in the ear of a confused young adult. I may not have loved D.C. after spending four years in the place, but it was easy to second-guess myself, especially since most of my classmates were making post-graduate plans in Washington.

So when I met this cute guy and began falling in love, I convinced myself that Washington would be an okay place to hang tight, for a little while at least. If nothing else, it was neutral ground. And maybe the city with imprint me with its intrinsic D.C.-ness, thus bestowing upon me all those traits I had thought were lacking in myself—somehow, I’d become cosmopolitan, important, and powerful. Interesting. Worthy.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about home.

I’ll start by saying this: I’m not sure I’ve ever really had one. My (divorced) parents changed residences a few times between them; plus, I spent my pre-college years bouncing between their respective places. I still do, whenever I’m back in Illinois. Maybe as a result, I started to feel twitchy about this lack of stability—I was always anticipating the next upheaval.

College didn’t help much in the way of stability, since students are generally condemned to spending each year in a new, cramped dorm room. And, as I’ve mentioned here, I’ve spent the the past two post-grad years floundering around in some pretty bleak parts of the D.C. metro area. I looked at this experience with rose-colored glasses for a long time, until the situation deteriorated (hi, bedbugs!) and it just became clear that I needed more for myself. Until recently, I’d been filling my weekends with travel plans and cooking sprees, but I came to realize that even a full refrigerator wasn’t getting me any closer to the safe haven I craved. My constant desire to leave town didn’t help, either.

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On the way back from work tonight, my usual route met me with its usual, miserable traffic jam. But this time, the cause was different. Instead of the normal volume-related pileup, tonight’s roads were clogged because someone had abandoned his car in the middle of Route 7. I reached, then passed the darkened vehicle eventually, but glancing at it sideways, I didn’t feel one twinge of annoyance. Honestly, I couldn’t really blame the guy.

Because I know what it’s like to feel like cutting and running, too. I’m confined all day by claustrophobia-inducing cubicle walls, y’all. There’s that aforementioned and predictably atrocious commute, plus a no-longer-homey apartment (it hasn’t been the same since my neighbor’s bedbugs invaded my own four walls. Yeah, let’s not talk about that). I have big plans in the works, of course, ones that (fingers crossed) will change all of the above. And I promise you’ll hear about them when the time is right. But until the day my lease is up, I’ve resolved to find inspiration in the parts of my life I still control.

Recently, I’ve found hope in the posts of two new-to-me blogs. At Makeunder My Life, Jess Constable has written about creating a home in the way that Michelangelo created his statue of David. (“It is easy,” he apparently said of sculpting a masterpiece from a boulder. “You just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David.”) Instead of finding peace in consumption, Jess talks about finding it through “exfoliating” unnecessary possessions, making her home’s trash-to-treasure ratio more favorable by subtracting, not adding. John and Sherry Petersik, over at the very fun home blog Young House Love (represent, Virginia!), seem to share a similar philosophy. It’s encapsulated in this post on living happily with less. And from their (very smart) posts on frugality, I’ve been inspired to start using and enjoying the things I already have—everything from pantry items to that long-ignored Netflix subscription.

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A few weeks ago, I flew home for a fleeting 28 hours. It was all I could spare without using a vacation day, and believe me when I say: it was not enough Chicago.

No, it wasn’t enough Chicago at all. But it was just enough time to make me remember why I missed the place.

28 hours was enough time to make a post-flight stopover in Park Ridge for diner grub at the Pickwick Restaurant. It was enough time to hug Lily and Archie, who I’d picked out as kittens so many years ago. It was enough time to traipse through Chicago’s neighborhoods with my dad, and enough time to visualize myself living in the Wicker Park apartment building surrounded by wildflowers. I had enough time to harass my little brother as we tooled around in the car together, and enough time to vent to my mother about life as an adult. 28 hours was enough to allow me one peaceful visit to the lakefront and bask in the almost Caribbean blue of the water. And it was enough time to sit on the porch under an eerie, post-storm sky, eating Paul Prudhomme’s grilled chicken and drinking in my last few hours there.

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