Finn & a Fit of Madness

Like the Chicago Fire 2.0, a wild and ephemeral love affair burned down everything in its wake.

This piece was first written and published on Medium in 2020.

On the first night I moved to Chicago, I found myself at a gay bar in Boystown sipping watered-down vodka sodas. I felt like I was emerging from a hazy dream, at the starting line of the future, taking control of my life for the first time. For a few years following college, I lived in Ohio through what felt like no decision of my own. It was there, with my arm pinned against my back, that I looked into the face of all the inevitabilities I was told I should want—marriage, kids, a white picket fence in the suburbs—and tried to resign myself to them. I tried and tried, convinced I could make myself want it if I could just have enough time. But years passed, and I still didn’t want the trappings of the mediocre life that was so desperately being sold to me. So I crumpled up my life in Ohio like a discarded piece of newspaper, ended a 3-year relationship, and clawed my way out of those narrow-minded corn fields.

Chicago was the only place I had ever felt alive. It was an oasis in a desert of Midwest mediocrity, and when I arrived for good, I was drunk on freedom, like a kite with its string cut.

That first night I strategically chose a gay bar because I didn’t want to get hit on. I didn’t want to be approached, to have conversations out of obligation, to worry about tactfully and respectfully turning someone down. I wanted to listen to shitty karaoke and buy my own drinks. But as the universe does, it throws wrenches into plans with no explanation, and this time the wrench was in the shape of a man.

An (incidentally) straight man from Ireland introduced himself to me after slaying his karaoke rendition of “Twist and Shout.” I promptly fumbled over his name, the incongruous syllables like moving my tongue around a mouthful of mud. Maybe it was the alcohol coursing through my veins, maybe it was the seedy fluorescent light painting our faces in watercolors, but I thought, “What the hell?” and dived in. But there are always caveats with wrenches, and what began from there can only be described as a fit of madness, a delusional period of equal parts ecstasy and loathing.

He first came to Chicago a few years prior and fell so deeply in love with her that he overstayed his visa and never left. It was a feeling I could relate to because she had been beckoning to me for years, and once she had me in her embrace, I never wanted to leave. Meeting him and falling for him completely altered my view on immigration. Illegal immigrants used to be an abstract concept to me, shadowy figures without faces or histories who snuck across borders for nefarious aims. And yet here he was in front of me, bright eyes, calloused hands, just as head-over-heels for this city as I was and his only crime was that he wanted to stay.

He had a voice for radio, his accent deep and lilting like warm bourbon; so different from my own accent, stark and crisp like a sour apple. I spent many nights with my head on his shoulder, asking him to tell me stories, tell me anything, just keep talking. He did. He talked of the past, like a nostalgic lullaby, of his family in a huge house in the country, his 5 siblings and the characters of his small town, his grandmother, the town gossip, the local pub.

He was utterly fearless and thirsty for life in a way I needed. I had thrown away comfort and stability, and I wanted to set the world ablaze. So we clasped our hands and burned hot and fast, like a wildfire tearing across the cement and brick and steel of that big city, like the Chicago Fire 2.0.

We were always going, always chasing a feeling and making grand plans in a pack of friends, always trying to open wine bottles against walls because we were too forgetful to ever bring a wine opener. When he forgot his passport and couldn’t get into the bar, I pulled the fire alarm so he could sneak in through the back door.

He helped me buy a Schwinn bicycle from the 70s, bright yellow and vintage, and we rode from bar to bar, the tracks left by our bicycles getting more and more wavy as the night progressed. I remember trying to balance a 24-pack of PBR on my handlebars and laughing maniacally as the cicadas roared on those hot summer nights.

There were times we tried to slow our roll, nights when we would play at being lovers and he would don matching socks and take me out to dinner. But there was too much fire in each of us to ever settle to a slow burn, and overlying it all are the memories of when he stood me up, and I spent the duration of a pasta-making class humiliated and trying not to cry. Or when he drove too fast and slipped on the ice and crashed my car into a ditch in Iowa. Or after a particularly nasty fight at 3 am when he threw my house keys into a tree leaving me stranded outside my apartment in the middle of the night.

And yet, he was not all fire and sharp edges, and I glimpsed a softness in him that shocked me when my mom got him a Christmas gift, and he put his head in his hands and cried.

He bought me a ring. He didn’t get on a knee but he did ask me to marry him. I couldn’t tell if he was serious and I couldn’t tell if I wanted to. People said it would be a hell of a story to tell my grandkids and the romantics of it all had me tripping and stumbling, unable to tell up from down.

It ended in a hazy burst of violent madness that broke a little bit of both of us. I cried in my car and told him I would never see him again. A few weeks later I went to Ireland, his home that he was now barred from, a trip I had been planning for months. I felt him with me on those streets, at the bottom of a pint of Guinness, and in the faces of the bar patrons I sat shoulder to shoulder with. I slept in his sister's bedroom, and in the morning, she made me a traditional Irish breakfast, something he and I had spent many mornings daydreaming about for when he was no longer an exile, his sister taking his place in this reality because I was in his home country and he was still in mine.

I live in Seattle now, and he always seems to be in New York. An entire country and several years lie between us. I think we see now that like the Chicago fire, our love was like a conflagration that left destruction and ashes in its wake, and only now are we able to look back together and laugh at that period of chaos, at our shared madness. Gabriel Garcia Marquez said, “The wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end,” and while I’d agree, I think a fleeting love is no less bright.