Three weeks and two days ago from now the title of my blog will be misleading or just outright wrong. I will instead be newlyunindonesian, and newlychicagoan, or, I guess, newlyrechicagoan, given that I’ll never feel new in Chicago because I spent the first 18 years of my life there. I wonder how quickly 18 years of being used to being freezing can be erased. Probably really quickly. Probably I’ll step out of the terminal at O’Hare and promptly shrivel up and die.

I’m drinking water. Trying to picture that water being ice. Trying to picture that ice being everywhere. My windows closed. Ice on these windows. Some rusting old heater – if Indonesia ever had a reason to make heaters, what bizarre defect would they have? – and its blasting cycles, like at home. For some reason I think it’d be like the one at home in that way.

Trying to remember walking in the snow, being so cold that the only thing I want in the world is to be warm. I remember it best in Chicago, the feeling of emerging from the subway. Wind tunnels down the stairs, like Chicago doesn’t want you emerging, would rather you stay underground. A scarf being the more important thing you own, and if it’s a fashion scarf, or knitted sloppily, with large looped holes in it, then it fails. No, it must be inches thick and ugly, industrial. Preferably brown and multilayered. Stuck to your face with frozen snot.

I can write it well enough, but that’s about it – I can’t feel it. The other day the sky opened up on me as I was arguing with a random guy who was trying to make me pay Rp. 20,000 for sitting on a hill, and my T-shirt stuck to my body and I thought, shit, I’m cold. I think it was about 85 degrees outside.