Although I grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis, I spent most of my high school years driving into the city every night. On the way both there and back, I would pass Lake Minnetonka, staring out across the water in the dark, watching the sailboat races on summer weekends. In the winter, I drove by without looking; whatever movement the water felt in those months was hidden away beneath the ice. Passing through the cold, distant sun and the quiet lake, I felt as if I was driving the shores of my own restlessness and inabilty to leave. It seemed perfectly reasonable that this kind of winter would bring about the ant tunnels of downtown, the lit-up tubes keeping people from the cold as they continued the business of living.

Most of my activities downtown involved a haphazard searching for possibilities in the form of other people, places, or things to do. I ended up agreeing to show a boy named Jae around when he came to visit Macalester. We had never met. I wanted my tour to say something about myself and my life, to somehow present an ideal picture of who I could have been in the place I was already burning to leave behind. I was surprised to realize how little I knew about what there was to do and see that was specific to Minneapolis. My own searching had been unfocused and hopelessly generalized. So when he asked about the city, the only unique thing I could think of was the skyways, which hovered over the streets that day looking vaguely ridiculous in the late afternoon light. But Jae never seemed to realize my uncertainty or resent my inadequacies as a host. We talked and laughed as he followed me easily around town all afternoon. I led him through the maze above the city with the same false and careless familiarity with which I would touch his body in the dark of the Lagoon Theater that evening. When we got lost, eventually, we descended again to the streets, where the October air was starting to carry the first taste of winter.