Walking alone after nights at the club is a harshness that steals the manic delusion of invincibility accompanying a few lines of coke. The streets stretch out before me like the first notes of a Beethoven symphony when I walk alone in Chicago. There are moments of light then dark, quiet then dissonance, the hum of life and the buzz of machines in a distance. The solitude momentarily brings me to a stormy climax of mixed tears, clenched fists and a bass rumble. Then, briefly, the bitterness abates. A melodious consonance follows, and I might even hum.

“There’s someone I can call,” I always decide aloud.

I dial numbers into my cell phone, but I only reach answering machines or electronic voices explaining, as if each really knows, the someone I need is unavailable.

I find myself sinking with the music as it fades to silence.

On a street corner tonight not far from my apartment building, I stumbled over the leg of man without a home. I wasn’t paying attention to the sidewalk. He rumbled, his breath dank with liquor, and returned to sleep. I wondered why he didn’t have a home. I wondered if he had abandoned his children. He looked nothing like me, but I saw myself in his sleeping face.

My apartment always awaits a comfortless space. I look for reasons to linger under a street lamp. I peer through the window of a shop even after there isn’t a black cocktail dress or a Swiss cuckoo clock I haven’t already admired inside it to avoid my home. It never feels like home when I enter it alone.

I wore a short, gauzy lavender dress tonight. I’ve always loved lavender.

My mother wore a lavender skirt to church when I was girl. She and my father would steal kisses as they stood at the kitchen sink washing the dishes at night as I struggled to fill an empty sheet of loose-leaf paper with simple equations and short paragraphs. He loved her as children love their parents. When she was absent, he would grow quiet and placid until she returned. Granted, they had those fights when mother would point a wooden spoon at my father’s long, almost pointed nose reminding him how lucky he was to have daughters, sons and a wife who loved him.

“Sure,” she would say, “You can sit in a clubhouse all day sipping Long Island Ice Teas talking about nothing with men who don’t really know you. But when you’re old and you need someone to take care of you, don’t expect any of us to line up at your bedside with bedpans and damp towels.”

He always yielded. I can’t help but wonder that, as I watch the lights of the city glow over the skyline, if she had ever had moments like these. Moments when the weight of something stiffened her shoulders and anchored her feet to the ground following her like a tall shadow at dusk; moments when she walked into a corner drug store in the middle of the night as I did wearing my lavender dress and spiked black heels beneath my long, ivory legs.

Had my mother ever spent ten minutes picking out a bottle of liquor because most of the bottles weren’t potent enough anymore? Had she ever walked up to the counter where an irritated middle age man rested his generous stomach against the worn counter watching her as he would a group of rowdy teenage boys, his bushy eyebrows fluttering then sinking. Nor had my mother ever placed a bottle of one hundred proof Vodka on a counter, handed a twenty dollar bill to the cashier unsure of why he hesitated before tucking it into his cash register as if he wondered if he should accept it. Before he poured the remaining change into my palm, he rubbed his hairy thumb along the counter’s surface and addressed me with his eyes averted.

“For Christ’s sake, at least wipe the fuckin’ coke off your nose when you’re in public.”

My mother never reached over a counter to squeeze a man’s rough fingers into a fist before pushing it toward him, but I did.

“Just keep the change, you prick.”