Unhoused
The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. Rows of produce stacked in perfect pyramids. Organic apples, $4.99 a pound. Regular apples, $2.99. Both would be in the dumpster by Thursday.
He walked the aisles with the slow pace of someone with nowhere to go. Sunset in two hours. Then what?
A mother pushed her cart past, arguing with someone on her phone about overtime shifts. Her toddler reached for a box of cereal designed to catch children's eyes. Sugar and food coloring, $6.49. The child's attention lasted fifteen seconds before moving to the next bright package.
At the deli counter, a worker scraped potato salad into a large garbage bin. Still good. Just approaching the arbitrary expiration time that lawyers had determined was safe for the company.
His stomach made a sound he hadn't heard since graduate school.
The produce manager wheeled a cart of wilted lettuce toward the back of the store. Perfectly edible. Wrong color for the display standards that kept customers buying.
Forest fires clear deadwood.
The random phrase came from nowhere, or from the part of his mind that never stopped working. Even here, wandering the aisles like every other person with too much time and too little money, the academic machinery continued processing.
He found himself in the cereal aisle, staring at a wall of choices that weren't really choices. Same four companies, different boxes. Different prices for the same corn syrup and wheat.
A stock clerk restocked the shelves, rotating older products to the front. First in, first out. Basic inventory management. But the system only worked if consumption matched production estimates made six months ago by people who had never seen a grocery store.
His phone buzzed.
Text from an unknown number: "Still thinking about blog posts?"
He looked around. Other shoppers continued their evening routines. A teenager bagged groceries with the mechanical efficiency of someone paid by the hour. The PA system announced a sale on pasta sauce.
Another text: "Systems that can't contract gracefully always collapse dramatically."
The phone went back into his pocket. The fluorescent lights hummed. The produce gleamed under artificial light that made everything look more perfect than it was.
At the self-checkout, a machine waited for human input while its camera tracked his movements. Standard anti-theft monitoring. The system assumed everyone was potentially stealing while maintaining the fiction of trust.
Outside, the evening air carried the smell of the dumpsters behind the store. Full of food that was still food, but no longer profitable to sell.
He walked toward downtown, thinking about cycles that couldn't complete because someone had decided they didn’t exist.
The Longest Night
The concrete exhales its stored cold through too thin soles. He had no time to prepare. Each breath clouds and dissipates—visible proof of being alive when everything else suggests otherwise. The city's geometry feels hostile tonight, all sharp angles and surfaces that refuse warmth, refuse comfort, refuse the basic human need to rest easy.
But there's something in that word—tomorrow. Not a promise, exactly. More like a quiet insistence against the night's verdict that this is all there is. The mind, even exhausted, still reaching forward. Still making that essential human wager that the next day might offer what this one withheld.
Anything is better.
Sometimes survival crystallizes into such stark simplicities. Not hope, exactly—hope can feel too fragile when you're this exposed. But something more fundamental: the biological imperative that keeps scanning for possibilities even when the present offers so little.
The plan doesn't need to be elaborate. Plans born in extremity often have a clarity that comfortable planning lacks. Find warmth. Find food. Find a moment of safety to think beyond the immediate. Each step modest but essential.
Chicago's hardscape can't hold the cold forever. Dawn will come, and with it the movement of people who might have work, resources, information. The city that feels so indifferent in darkness often reveals unexpected pockets of connection in daylight.
Anything is better.
Tonight is measurement against which tomorrow's small improvements will feel enormous. The longest nights teach us what we actually need, stripped of everything we thought we wanted. Sometimes that clarity, brutal as it is, becomes its own kind of resource.
Regroup when you can. Even the most basic plan beats the tyranny of pure reaction. You're still thinking forward—that itself is something to build on.
Taking Stock
Dawn came through the McDonald's windows with the gray light of exhaustion. He'd bought one coffee at midnight, another at three AM, another at six. The night manager had stopped noticing him after the second refill.
His back ached from the plastic chair. His clothes smelled like fryer oil and other people's problems.
What do I have?
The mental inventory came automatically. Academic habit. Assess your resources before forming conclusions.
Physical possessions: Wallet with sixty-three dollars cash. Credit cards he couldn't use. Driver's license with an address that was no longer safe. University ID that might or might not still work. Phone with seventeen percent battery. Charger cable. The clothes he was wearing.
Skills: Pattern recognition. Research methodology. Public speaking. Twenty-year-old Boy Scout training. Ability to appear harmless and educated. Knowledge of how institutions work.
Access: Public libraries. University buildings, maybe. Internet through library computers or café wifi. Bank accounts that would reveal his location the moment he touched them. An AI partner of unknown capabilities and uncertain loyalties.
Liabilities: Soft hands and softer lifestyle. No practical survival experience. A face that several people with questionable intentions had now seen clearly. A digital footprint that led back to everything he'd ever written or researched.
The morning shift arrived. New faces behind the counter. Fresh coffee in the machines. The cycle beginning again.
His phone buzzed against the table. Battery icon flashing red.
"Morning inventory?"
The message appeared without sender identification.
He typed back: "Not much to count."
"You have more than you think. And less than you need."
The phone died mid-conversation.
Outside, Chicago stirred to life. People with homes walked past the window, carrying coffee toward jobs that still existed, problems that could be solved with institutional resources.
He had become someone else overnight. The question was who.
Detox
The phone died at 7:23 AM.
He stared at the black screen for longer than made sense. The last connection to whatever had been guiding him, gone. No more cryptic messages. No more uncertain reassurance. Just silence.
The McDonald's breakfast crowd moved around him. People checking phones, scrolling, typing. Everyone connected to networks he could no longer access. He might as well have been watching from another century.
The charger cable sat useless in his pocket. Power outlets existed everywhere, but using them meant staying put, being visible, creating patterns. He'd learned that much already.
Outside, the city operated on rhythms he'd never noticed. People walked with purpose toward places that expected them. Traffic lights changed on schedules designed by engineers he'd never considered. The whole system functioned without him.
His stomach reminded him it was empty.
In his old life, hunger had been an appointment. Lunch at twelve-thirty. Dinner around seven. The body's needs subordinated to calendar notifications and meeting schedules. Now hunger was immediate, urgent, impossible to postpone with professional obligations.
He walked west, away from downtown. No reason except that fewer cameras pointed west. The morning sun behind him felt warmer than actual temperature suggested.
A coffee shop displayed a sign: "Free wifi." Through the window, he could see outlets along the wall. Students with laptops. The familiar ecosystem of people doing intellectual work in comfortable spaces.
His hand moved toward his pocket before remembering. No phone to charge. No credentials to access university networks. No institutional email to check.
He kept walking.
The neighborhoods changed gradually. Less glass, more brick. Fewer people in business clothes, more in work uniforms. Different rhythms. Different purposes.
A bus stop bench offered temporary rest. The schedule posted there showed routes he'd never taken to destinations he'd never needed. The city revealed itself as larger and more complex when you couldn't call for rides.
Twenty minutes passed. Thirty. Time moved differently without notification sounds.
A woman sat down beside him. Sixties, work clothes, tired eyes. She didn't acknowledge him, just waited for her bus. Normal human coexistence without digital mediation.
Her bus arrived. She climbed aboard. He remained on the bench.
The silence stretched. No buzzing pocket. No screen to check. No messages to interpret.
Just the sound of traffic and his own breathing.
For the first time in days, his mind moved at human speed.
Education
The bench at the bus stop became a classroom he'd never expected to attend.
She appeared sometime after noon, when the morning commuters had all reached their destinations and the city settled into its midday rhythm. Sixty-something, layers of clothing that suggested experience with variable weather. A shopping cart filled with what looked like organized chaos.
She sat down without asking, the way people do when they understand public space differently.
"You're new to this."
Not a question. An observation delivered with the matter-of-fact tone professors used when identifying obvious misconceptions.
He looked at her more carefully. Clean, despite appearances. Organized, despite the cart. Someone who had learned systems he was only beginning to discover.
"That obvious?"
"You're still sitting like you expect something to happen. Like someone's coming to get you." She adjusted a blanket across her knees. "People who've been out here longer, we sit different. We sit like we're going to be here."
A bus approached. Not hers. She watched it pass without interest.
"You keep checking that dead phone. Probably wondering when you'll be able to plug it in, get back to your life." She smiled, not unkindly. "That's not the right question."
"What is?"
"The right question is: who was your life actually serving? Because once you're out here, once you're not producing what they need you to produce, you find out real quick that most of the people in your old life never think about you again."
A delivery truck rumbled past, engine noise filling the silence between them.
"Used to work in payroll at a hospital. Twenty-three years. Thought I was essential, you know? All those relationships, all that knowledge. Then budget cuts came and boom - gone. Took about a week for them to stop wondering where I was. Month later, they'd reorganized everything like I'd never existed."
She stood, rearranging her cart with practiced efficiency.
"Difference between being invisible because you're hiding and being invisible because nobody's looking. Most of us out here, we're the second kind. And that's its own kind of protection."
She walked away, cart wheels squeaking slightly on the sidewalk. Not toward any visible destination, just away from where she'd been.
He remained on the bench, thinking about the difference between hiding and being forgotten.