When I moved to Chicago after graduating college, it was my first time moving to a Big City. Having been a child of the suburbs (and a college student of "Hey, look, some corn"), the transition to The City felt at the time like a big, adult-like step. It was viscerally exciting just to move to any city, a place where apartment buildings were packed together between thin strips of for-the-heck-of-it grass. Where there was an endless supply of new restaurants to try. Where I'd see a fresh assortment of faces every day. Where crime and parking tickets were real. Where public transit was available to take me anywhere I wanted to go.
To be fair, though, moving to Chicago felt essentially natural, because Chicago has always been "my city" -- the only place anyone ever meant when they said they were headed "downtown." It was the center of all the weather maps. Growing up in the suburbs meant that, though I would forever be excluded from that privileged class of true-blood, inborn Chicagoans, I instinctively knew what being a Chicagoan meant. Before moving there, I already knew the city's history, reputation, and neighborhoods, its major street festivals, music venues, and landmarks. I knew what was considered "touristy" and had a vague sense of how to avoid appearing like an outsider. I knew all the relevant local terms and how to use them properly in a sentence. (CTA. Metra. Trib. Loop. Red Eye. L. Lakeshore. Sears Tower and Marshall Fields, dammit.)
That inborn sense of being atmospherically "from Chicago" never really occurred to me until I moved to Boston, and it only occurred to me then because moving to Beantown was a fundamentally different experience. After being here a month or so, I suddenly and strikingly felt that, though I quickly acclimated to living here, I didn't have the same, instinctual familiarity with this city that I did Chicago. Its neighborhoods and character were foreign to me. (What's "South End"? Is it different from "Southie"? Am I allowed to call it "Southie"? Or is that something only Will Hunting can say?) My knowledge of the city was limited to the "touristy" attractions in town, provided I got some assistance from websites and guide books. And even after figuring out the T, visiting the Common and the Public Gardens, walking the Freedom Trail, and snickering at John Handcock's headstone, I had a hard time shaking the sense that I was still an outsider and a visitor. I felt weird telling people I met that I was, technically speaking, a Bostonian.
Fast-forwarding to this week, approaching two years as a Boston resident, I'd for the most part forgotten about this mild, intra-American culture shock that I'd experienced when I first moved here. I've since become intimately acquainted with my own, specific neighborhood (the fact that Brighton is both kind-of-its-own-thing and kind-of-not no longer bewilders me), and I'm comfortably familiar with downtown. Mostly, though, I'd simply accepted the fact that "feeling like a real Bostonian" would always be unavailable to me; while I might get used to being a resident alien, growing up in another region of the country had forever barred me from cognitively integrating into this peculiar community. No matter how long I'm here, I'll be a Midwesterner inhabiting Boston, always.
Ironically, the violence, shock, anxiety, and mourning of the past seven days has caused me to confront and reassess the accuracy of that assumption. To be sure, I absorbed the events of the previous week at a physical distance: I was nowhere near the explosions on Monday, and I was safely sealed up in my apartment while the manhunt unfolded on Friday. But as I commiserated with friends [on Monday], cheered with strangers [on Friday], and looked on as a stream of events unfolded in between, there was a wrenching sensation in my gut that it was my city that was undergoing this pain, that my city was suddenly shoved into the news, and that I was celebrating with my city when the tension was finally released. One of my [Midwest-born] Boston-dwelling friends expressed my sentiments well when she commented (alerting her family and friends that she was safe a day or so after the blasts), "If anything, Boston now feels even more like home."
So, in the worst possible circumstances, I've discovered that I have an emotional claim to dual metro-citizenship. Just as Chicago is my town, I've woken up to the fact that Boston is, too. It's a tiny, insignificant glimmer of a silver lining in the complex cloud of panic and tragedy that comprised this week. But I'll take it.
