In Chicago, where you’re from is rarely just “Chicago.”
It is the neighborhood, the side of town, the L line you grew up near, the place you swear makes the best Italian beef, and whether tavern-style pizza is the only pizza that really counts. It is lakefront summers, brutal winters, dibs after a snowstorm, and a city where people can argue endlessly about food, sports, and geography and still agree that outsiders probably do not get it.
For the Chicagoans who eventually traded the lakefront for the desert, Vegas became a new chapter without erasing the old one.
You may live under palm trees now, but part of you still knows exactly what 20 degrees with wind off the lake feels like.
