Orkeed

Denver is a place tucked from me or it was. It was a tiny and silent location on a map I never much thought about except if a stranger on the bus in a flurried question and a letter in hand with a half in address on it asked me if I knew the capital of Denver at the six AM bus on the BART. It is an authentic story. Of course this philosopher acquaintance of mine would have something to say about what is authentic or not. Her name is name of another city, Chicago. She said her parents named her that name not because of the musical because both of them disliked musicals, but because her cries sounded so fierce, fierce like the winds that blow in Chicago. She cried a lot as a child, but she was not really, Chicago told me. She was just so frustrated that no one wanted to hear her ideas about what was authentic and what Derrida and Foucault and she had to say about the subject that her anxiety about not being able to articulate herself came out as cries.

Chicago might seem strange but we all are a little strange. Chicago just has bit more than the rest of the people in Denver or any other city. She was a lawyer in that tucked in city, Denver. Lawyers there always had briefcases and fancy fountain pens that came in only the colors black and blue. Chicago did not think the lawyers there chose those colors because those are business colors but because those colors match the bruised skies during the winter when the city is tucked in with snow that has threads of dead branches keeping it together.

She stopped being a lawyer one day, not because she was unhappy, but because she suddenly had an epiphany. She was in the wrong line of work. She remembered she was supposed to be a philosopher when the wind started to howl through the branches of the threading trees. She literally quite her practice that day and started to read Simone de Beauvoir and other people whose names I got difficulty typing. Chicago went to Paris to study the art of philosophy but she always comes home to the city of Denver where she remembered what is was she was supposed to be doing for those thirty years she was a lawyer, and still is. Now she knows the laws of philosophy: she knows that are no laws and that was why she was frustrated as a baby.