"Old Habits Die Young

1.

When I had nothing, I had imagination. I’d imagine an old shoebox was the newest Playstation. I’d imagine a reality where we ran the oven to bake cookies instead of to fight off Chicago’s bitter winters. And yet, in every dream, in every figment of my imagination, I still lived in those God-forsaken apartments.

You never really escape that trapped feeling of living in Trentwood Towers. Stuck waiting for the first and fifteenth of the month, I felt my skin could peel as easily as the wilting wallpaper. I had been trapped for the first seventeen years of my life in those West Side studios, and it felt more like a jail cell than a home. The surplus of 24-hour bail bond joints on our block sure made it feel that way, at least.

Mom even tried moving us from apartment 15-B to 67-C. We learned the first floor was the most dangerous. Ricocheting bullets and rats kept her revolving door of boyfriends at a safe distance, so, in pursuit of my next father figure, we went to the sixth floor. Unfortunately, even the men bold enough to date my mom had the intuition to fear that stairwell. Around every corner of flickering lights was an induction ritual, and Lord have mercy on the poor soul who decided to take the elevator instead. That’s where most of the apartment's 911 calls were made, anyway: an average 712 reports a year.

My mind tried to convince me that the elevator’s scent of weed and urine was a monster in the shaft, but reality had no remorse. Imagination has its limits, and I couldn’t always will a more exciting truth into existence. There was no green monster in the elevator. The bullet casings on the lawn weren’t relics from an ancient civilization. And mom wasn’t just tired from a day job fighting ninjas. She was tired from fighting cancer, and there’s no reality I could imagine where she survived.

“That mind of yours can’t get me out of this one,” she told me, “but it can get you outta here.”

These memories accompany me on my L ride home everyday. It’s been a decade since I left Trentwood, and still, the single mother rationing cereal to her boys on my train forces reflection.

My wife of two years, Elize, has the foresight to see the past before it catches up to me. When the memories are too hard to face, I spiral, and she ends up dealing with my bouts of depression, my dodging of landlords and police alike. She’s the one that pushes me to keep on.

But impressing Elize has never been easy. Despite an upbringing not unlike mine, she’ll ask me why panhandler’s can’t try harder. She’s not fond of my “gourmet” Maruchan ramen nor my religious aggression towards doctors. I’m often even unable to sleep in our bed. I slept on a couch most of my life, so my unfamiliarity has birthed sleep anxiety and consequently, recurring sleep paralysis. And it scares Elize. Shit, it scares me.

The first time I suffered from sleep paralysis, I don’t even remember falling asleep. I just remember the weight on my chest. The nostalgic trapped feeling. My eyes darted around my bedroom as I hyperventilated, searching for a way to escape the suffocating grasp of sleep. But I was caught in limbo between total incapacity and overstimulating hyperawareness. I merely existed, frozen with only one function: dread. To dread the monsters that hid behind my dresser. To dread my wife who I pictured bleeding out in the ‘frunch’ room.

In those eternal moments, the silence became deafening. Anticipation controlled me, and as sweat dripped down my cheek, he emerged.

Illuminated only by a pocket of reflective light from my window, a creature, emaciated and skeletal in form, lurked in the shadows. His flesh sagged below his jaw, and his teeth protruded through his upper lip. His steps lengthened with each stride, and in an instant, he stood over me at the foot of my bed. I tried screaming for Elize, but I was voiceless. That Trentwood Towers-raised fighter was gone, and instead, I was forced to watch this creature grab my toes in his icy palms as he gnawed layer by layer.

The creature sank his teeth into my feet, ripping through the dead skin and bones, and I eventually mustered the energy to form an agonized scream. When he finally raised his head, blood dripping from his chin, a smile formed across his gnarled face.

“Come home,” he sneered before disappearing into the darkness altogether.

He came to me again last night. His haunting whisper reverberates from train car to train car today, serving as a gut-wrenching reminder of a beast I’ve never escaped, and it’s accompanied by the familiar mildewed stench of my old West side apartment.

I kept telling myself that I’d never return, but muscle memory took over, and now I’m on the Green Line towards Trentwood Towers.

Elize won’t be impressed.

2.

It’s always surprised me how fast the city decays between United Center and Trentwood. Within that two-minute train ride, Chicago transforms from modern condos to graffiti-covered shops. The other difference in wealthy neighborhoods is the absence of curtains. Mom was the first to point that out.

“They act like they’ve never been cased,” she’d tell me.

I used to gaze beyond the glass to see mounted flatscreens and ornate decorations, and I’d pray that one day, we’d find a home with vaulted ceilings too. Ironically, despite those neighborhoods being within walking distance, I felt that dream was unreachable. Elize and I now live in an idyllic residential neighborhood, but home is a distant concept that precedes me. I could live on the quietest block in Chicago, and I’d still do as Mom said and keep the blinds closed. It’s safer that way. That was the reality of Trentwood then, and I assume, that’s the reality now. It’s never been an easy truth to reconcile with, but little in my life has been. Take the man laying across from me on the train, covered in maggots, for example.

When I finally got off the L, sliding my hand against the rusted railing, I was met with empty lots of unshoveled snow and boarded-up boutiques. I followed several alleys of dead vines until I saw that familiar plaque: “CHICAGO HOUSING AUTHORITY”.

But behind that sign was not the Trentwood I remembered. Where there was once a cracked sidewalk, there was now a delicately paved walkway. The crumbling foundation of Trentwood had been stripped and finished with multicolored paneling. An all-too-perfect symmetry radiated from my former prison.

“Well, if it ain’t Ty Walters!”

A familiar voice pierced through the frigid winter air, all but disturbing the peace. Upon tilting my head up, I saw a well-groomed gentleman emerging from a window on the sixth floor. Even from where I was standing, the scent of Axe alone was strong enough to pin down his identity. Elliot: mom’s only boyfriend who stuck around. Youth sprang into my feet, and in a moment, I was gliding through his front door.

“Where you been, son?” he asked me.

I surveyed the face of this man I once knew. Gray had always been a feature of his beard, but the trimmed edges refined his silver fox look. Elliot’s eyes no longer sank into the sockets.

“You’ve cleaned up…” was the only string of words I could muster.

“It’s more than me that’s cleaned up, young man.”

He was right. It was clear the fabric of Trentwood had changed, and the morose worldviews that limited us had dissipated. This was the focus of our conversation over the next several hours, concluding in a discovery that money can buy some semblance of happiness. As the conversation trailed and I stood up to exit, Elliot leaned in to take my hand.

“We’ve missed you here,” he said. “When your mother passed, I knew you’d go too. Heard you was sleeping on train cars still. Matter of fact, I was a witness to it. That’s why I kept praying you’d come home.”

Elliot made sure I knew of his recent conversion into a God-fearing man. Still, his honesty was always the first thing to be sacrificed for the sake of a good story.

“You think I’d lie, son? Back me against a wall, I’d swear my life.”

“No, it’s just— mom’s cancer made it hard to ever come back,” I told him. I watched as Elliot’s bittersweet smile was replaced by confusion.

“I ain’t sure if… ” his voice trailed. After recollecting his thoughts, he sighed and looked to the ground. “You seem to have forgotten a lot. Your mom never had cancer…”

At that moment, my ears began ringing. I could feel my face burning,

“Your mom died from alcohol poisoning.”

His words were drowned out by breathing, and my attention redirected to the window. There, I stared through the glass panes at Trentwood’s snowy courtyard, and one observation dominated my mind: the blinds are up. The blinds are up. I compulsively opened my mouth to respond to Elliot, but my eyes remained on the window. Before I could say anything, Elliot’s voice deepened and reverberated across the room.

“Ty, the truth isn’t what it seems,” was the last thing I heard before my vision tunneled. All that existed before me was out beyond that window, and at the center of my gaze stood a shadowy figure.

It was him: that monstrous figment from the depths of my subconscious. His rib bones, bracing against his pale skin, left little room for imagination. He stood in that empty courtyard, camouflaged in the snow, as his knuckles swung against the ground. His abyssal gaze met mine from the sixth floor, and I could feel the valves of my heart bursting. My soul fell out of my skin, and I felt helpless, staring down at Death himself.

When I turned my head and screamed for Elliot, he had vanished into thin air. Instead of the refurbished studio I was in moments ago, I sat imprisoned between four bare, concrete slabs. The windows had transformed into shattered openings, and that cold Chicago wind hummed through the building's cracked ceiling.

I jumped to my feet in an instant and sprinted out of the decaying room. As soon as I exited, I was met with the stairwell of Trentwood: six flights of steeply-cut stairs with darkness at every turn. Rather than the crowded hub it once was, silence crept from every angle, and in an instinct of survival, I sprinted down the stairs at an unprecedented rate.

Upon escaping the rotted building, I realized that this apartment building had opted for a crawling execution instead of a revival. Not a soul existed within the confines of Trentwood’s corpse, and I knew I could no longer trust intuition for my next move. All I knew: I had to get home to my wife.

3.

That night, I traversed the metropolitan jungle as a nightcrawler. In the reflections of every building, I saw Death stalking me, but after hours of fear-induced transit, I arrived at my Northside residence. I anxiously knocked on the front door, longing to see Elize. Who opened the door, however, was not my wife. Instead, a thin red-headed man came to greet me, confusion displaying across his young face.

“Who the hell are you?” I bluntly asked him.

“Um, can I help you?” the stranger responded, interjecting an uncomfortable laugh. I maneuvered to peer past him into my apartment, but he blocked me. This nonverbal exchange continued as my frustration mounted.

“I don’t know what kind of sick game you’re playing, but I want you outta my house…now!” I yelled.

He reached to close the door, so I slid my hand in the gap. Startled, he told me, “I’ve lived here for the last three years, dude. If you’re on drugs or whatever, I can get you some help.”

“Let me see my wife,” I demanded. In a moment of desperation, I lunged at him to force entry into the house. “Elize! Elize!”

Our struggle intensified, and I pushed him down the front steps, watching as his head smacked against the pavement. Several loose Marlboros leapt from his shirt pocket to the blood pooling around him. Maybe it was the Trentwood in me, but before I knew it, I had fled the scene, pocketing one of the stranger’s cigarettes. Can’t go wasting what’s good.

I spent all night trying to convince myself that Elize was real. The squeal of the L kept me company when the thoughts were too loud. And after several hours, I found myself in the same Green Line car as the maggot-covered homeless man I’d seen before.

“Trentwood, is that you?” he grumbled.

Fatigue consumed me, and I was too exhausted to speak. I silently offered him a blood-covered cigarette.

As the train car jerked against the nocturnal Chicago skyline, the man moved to sit next to me. He lifted his hood, and underneath was the weathered face of mom’s longtime boyfriend: Elliot. My silence gave way to confusion.

“You shouldn’t smoke. It’s a bad habit,” Elliot said, bursting out in laughter. “I get it! Be good or bad, these habits keep your mind elsewhere.”

Elliot appeared as he once had: an unkempt beard framing his sunken eyes.

“I had a friend who done started to see the world as it really was,” Elliot continued. “No cigarettes. No imagination to keep ‘em straight. And he went mad. He couldn’t accept that reality, and before long, he was playin’ in traffic on Lake Shore Drive. That was last Tuesday. See, he accepted our lives, and that’s too hard for any sane man to bear.”

Elliot clutched my hand, and his eyes pierced my soul. “You either live long in those old habits, or you die young accepting reality. Your choice.”

At dawn, I found myself trudging through the snow on the Westside. Within those alleyways, within Trentwood’s elevator, like a mom between paychecks: I was cursed to be trapped in a maze of familiarity. Mom often prayed for me to break beyond these shackles, but Trentwood was so deeply interwoven into my identity that I couldn’t exist beyond its walls.

Searching for relief from the bite of winter, I crawled into the broken elevator shaft. I pinched myself in hopes that I would awaken from this nightmare; however, the pain was unmistakably authentic. The flesh of my feet had frozen to the bone. Death had begun closing in, and a tear dripped down my cheek. In that moment, the salty scent of tears transformed into the smell of warm cookies.

A familiar voice cut through the silence. “Ty, I’m home.”

That’s when mom came through our door.