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On Sunday afternoon, I locked my bike near Wicker Park proper and wandered into the local farmers market, a sea of white tents in a steamy green jungle of trees and flowers.

I bought a pint of fall’s first Honeycrisp apples — smaller than usual but still shiny, firm and bright golden red — and a pound of crimini mushrooms, picked the night before and loaded onto a truck before the sun came up.

The man behind the mushroom table upended a cardboard carton into a brown paper bag and rolled the top over quickly. I handed him six dollars, and he held the bag out to me. These mushrooms were so fresh they’d last two weeks in the refrigerator, he said. As I walked away, I unrolled the bag and buried my nose in it, breathed in the damp, earthy scent. Mushrooms from the grocery store don’t smell like that, like…life.

I grabbed my bike, hung my plastic bag from the handlebars and wove through traffic on Milwaukee Avenue, still full from breakfast with a friend at the Earwax Café: hand-squeezed orange juice, bottomless coffee, an omelet with diced tomatoes, feta cheese and fresh chopped basil from an unseen backyard garden. The afternoon temperature seemed to climb as I rode; ribbons of heat blew up around me from the pavement.

Summer’s last stand.

Sunday was my first honest attempt to slow down.

Because the last thing I remember really clearly — that I didn’t write down, for posterity — is the night the Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup. Not because I was out watching the game and celebrating, but because I was lying in a beautiful queen-size bed, alone, on the verge of tears when the city erupted. Cheers and fireworks and honking horns, and I was about to break up with the love of my life.
I woke up on Sunday morning and realized it would be September soon. Tomorrow, in fact. It was just June, and now it’s September.

Tomorrow marks a big ending, and an even bigger new beginning: my last day of work and the first day of, well…of the rest of my life.

I joined a gym last night. I joined a gym with towel service and a big basket of tiny apples. I went to the post office. I made myself dinner. I wrote. I called my mother. I met a friend for ice cream. Then I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling until almost midnight.

Every silly moment assumes new significance lately. Today, I wrote a coworker and told him I was sending him the last funny YouTube video he’d ever receive from my work e-mail. I rode my bike home from the train station, off balance from a heavy tote bag full of Tupperware, mugs, boxes of tea, paperwork and the rest of my everyday life for the past three years. Tomorrow, I’ll unplug my silver desk lamp and iPhone charger, and shut down my laptop for the last time. In two weeks, a new editor starts in my place.

Bittersweet.

But despite the significance this week holds for my life, the end of so many rituals and routines and I came home tonight, dressed down into gym clothes and attempted to begin a new routine before the other had even ended. I ran on a treadmill, red-faced and out of breath, because celebrating this sweet new life will be so much sweeter if I don’t hate looking in the mirror every day.

I came home and sautéed a big handful of those beautiful mushrooms in olive oil and garlic, tossed them with whole-wheat ravioli and the last of a jar of marinara sauce. I made myself dinner like a grown-up. I sat on the sofa to eat with a glass of wine, flipped channels as I sipped.
The idea of my stores of food dwindling because I’m actually eating what I’ve bought is much more comforting than throwing away bags full of rotten produce after another week of nonstop restaurant eating.

On my last night as a working stiff, I’m tucked into bed, writing, before 10 p.m.
And my entire apartment smells like garlic and mushrooms. Like life.

Smells like home, actually. For the first time.

Spring break of senior year, my high school choir toured Italy.
We started raising money in the fall: Each student sold wrapping paper and dip mixes and Christmas trinkets from flimsy glossy brochures; as a group, we sold “Lancer Liquid,” bottles of water at concerts; we spent a fortune recording holiday CDs but made even more on them.
I remember complaining about all the work it took to raise that money.

Until one day, the entire choir — about a hundred of us — filed into the Basilica San Marco in Venice on some afternoon in the middle of Lent.

We made our way into the dark church; prayer candles in clear red jars glowed near the entrance and signs warned us pictures were forbidden. We let our eyes adjust, let the darkness embrace us. The smell of incense hung heavy in the air; ancient stone surrounded us. And…well, God: If He exists, He was there.

We fell into our bowed formation, as we had at the Roman ruins, in the Pantheon, outside the oldest university in the world in Bologna, in a piazza near the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

Mr. Resseguie wore a faded sweatshirt and had taken off the Bears hat he’d worn the whole trip. An outline in the darkness raised its arm to begin directing…

And pointed at me.

“Ubi,” he said in a stage whisper, loud enough for the angels to hear.
Ubi Caritas. My eyes widened. The only solo I’d ever sung, and he wanted me to sing it in Venice.
One of the boys played my note on the pitch pipe, and I closed my eyes. Felt the drop of his hand and opened my mouth to sing, and…music came out. Twelve syllables, even fewer actual notes… It felt like an eternity.

A pregnant pause after I cut off, before the choir came in. And I heard two of me. Six seconds of reverberation: I was harmonizing with myself.

It was the most beautiful feeling of my life. Better than sex, better than my first glass of good red wine in Philadelphia or the sublime corn chowder at Gramercy Tavern. I couldn’t breathe for a moment, then I couldn’t imagine missing a single note of our only opportunity to sing a Lenten Mass. For a few minutes — 10? 15? — we weren’t high school students. We weren’t being taped inside our hotel rooms at night and followed by chaperones, one to every five students. We were this all-feeling musical body, shapeless and ageless and able to do no wrong.

When the concert was over, there was no applause. You don’t applaud in a cathedral. We were kids again and dispersed into the stained-glass recesses, into alcoves of rickety wooden pews and altars to saints and desperate pleas to help maintain the centuries-old church. We snuck pictures — the odd flash on an uncontrolled camera gave us away, and we were hushed and scolded, but we risked it because we were convinced we’d never return to such a place again.

We gathered outside afterward, before splitting into groups to explore the city of canals. I paid some gypsies for birdseed and grimaced as pigeons flocked to my arms, my shoulders, the top of my head. A small group of us drifted down the one of the canals, piloted by a man in a striped shirt with a red scarf around his neck.

That day is the sort of memory you cry for because you can’t just live it over and over again.
That makes you curse real life because it was proof that things can just be beautiful and simple and perfect.

And you know if you go back, it won’t be the same.

But never to have had it at all?
I’ll take the tears.

* Where charity and love are, God is there.

Nighttime isn’t darkness here. It’s the orange hum of streetlights and the buzz of neon beer signs, passing headlights and dim lamps through windows high above the sidewalks. It’s not silence; it’s just a different kind of noise. Battered Crown Vics peeling out at green lights and smokers reveling in their nicotine haze, a safe and legal 15 feet from the bar door.

Often, lately, I don’t notice these things. I don’t look at the sky to see that I can’t see the stars; I walk around in my own haze, the streetlights illuminating my beeline, cars no more than an obstacle in getting from place to place as quickly as possible.
I’m not often out this late and actually cognizant of my surroundings.

A girlfriend and I had been out sipping wine flights, noshing on cheese, talking about men. We tottered to another bar, after we’d stuffed ourselves, for a birthday gathering. I was ready to stop drinking, and not just because Miller Lite seemed to be the table’s drink of choice. I sipped water and took in my surroundings. Crystal clear, for once.
It was a bit surreal to realize how often I’ve been buzzed and fuzzy around the edges lately.
It would be easy to pigeonhole this realization as my retreat to Summer 2008, a vintage I will likely only recall in writing when I write my book.

This is not that.

I have to let myself believe that: I’m just getting my sea legs back. It’s the first time in quite a while that I’ve had something to celebrate. And when it rains, it pours: I have a whole new life to celebrate now.
I’d taken a twenty out of the bar’s ATM, prepared to take a cab home after yet another busy day, but when I stepped outside, walking seemed. Almost 11 p.m.

I made my way northwest on Milwaukee Avenue; cabs occasionally passed me and honked twice, briefly. I shook my head softly and they zoomed away. I watched their little yellow lights fade into the night.
I passed maybe three others on the sidewalk. No stumbling drunks, not a single panhandler or homeless person asleep on a bench. Just people on their way to their cars or back to their apartments. I’d found no man’s land.
I’d planned my outfit carefully for the evening: an oversize chambray shirt cinched with a blue beaded belt, black leggings, bangles and dangling earrings, sparkling gold flats. The leggings were a bold move, one I immediately regretted when I remembered I’d chosen them partially because they’re stretchy and my jeans don’t fit as well as they might.
Still, the look was more or less what I’d been going for.
Walking alone, white earbuds peeking from under my wavy hair, I felt pretty for the first time all day.
I passed the Chicago Blue Line and knew it would be smarter to get on the train the rest of the way home. But I was craving the solitude — something deeper than the bright anonymity of a train car alive with weekend partiers and fluorescent light.
Just past the station, there’s an abandoned building. It’s boarded up and covered in a thick coat of construction dust; the inside is gutted. The Blue Line runs just underneath the structure, and every time a train leaves the station, the boards rumble like it’s passing straight through the building.
But there’s an empty street just next to the building, and a highway beyond that. The train never does come crashing through the old brick.

That kind of solitude.

I paused on a bridge that crosses the highway, knowing just a length of chain-link fence and a few feet of concrete separated me from the speeding cars below. The melon glow of the streetlights shot a long-legged shadow before me.

Wait, two.
No, there’s a third.

One, zig-zagging along the curb and fading up the fence’s honeycomb into rushing traffic, was the shadow of summer 2008 Paige. She feeds me the energy to stay up late, to keep my dizzying schedule straight, to drink more than I eat some days. She stokes my mild platonic interests into blazing romantic fascinations, swoops to action with a deft charm and sexuality I forgot I possessed. She’s drunk on power and angling for a takeover.

A second, barely visible until I really trained my eyes on it, was Weakness. She misses the old life, the trees and strollers and puppies and the Shining Camry. She misses what the Knight was to her, what he saw in her. In…me. That shadow walked alongside me for much of the walk homeward, an invisible finger poised over his entry in my address book, at the ready to send a text message as soon as I let my guard down. She’s easy enough to ignore until the right darkness sets in.

The most clearly defined, jutting straight out from my sparkling shoes, was my real shadow. She was quiet, resigned, tired of fighting the other two. I took her the rest of the way across the bridge and locked us both safely inside my little apartment.
Then I turned off the lights and set my shadows aside in the soft blackness of my living room. Let my music wash over me. Darkly content.

I rode my bike to work today. Six days left of this life as I know it.
I’d left early enough to take my time; I pedaled slowly and took in the sunlight, tried to find nuance along the same street I’ve been traveling every morning for nearly two months now.
Feeling like the neighborhood is just waking up as I make my way to work is strange, but not unfamiliar.

The same persistent dogs tug at their leashes, dragging barely-awake owners to their favorite hydrant or planters, carrying out their daily routine with a joy that’s hard to fathom.

But I do feel that much more of a spring in my step, a push to my pedal. The bumps along Paulina Street bother me less and less.
Maybe it’s because I know I won’t have to endure them much longer. I won’t have to endure any of it much longer.
Or maybe it’s because I have too much else on my mind to notice those nicks in the road, bites taken out by years of wear and tear or a single harsh winter’s salt and snow.

But I did notice today:
The neighborhood smelled like cinnamon.
For just about a quarter block or so.
And I smiled the rest of the way to the train station.
Cinnamon in the air, just warm enough to imagine myself back in my kitchen, steam fogging up my glasses as I peer into the oven to check on a baking pan of Pillsbury rolls.
But cool enough to feel fall creeping in. Not quite a chill, but a cardigan doesn’t seem outlandish in that cinnamon sweetness.

The mercury dips; I’m floating.