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Randolph Metra Station
A threshold between past and present, between what was and what could be. A gate, a liminal space, a hinge in time. The air smells like steel, like the dampness of tunnels, like the collective breath of a million departures and arrivals.
vyle. stands here, waiting—but really, he's remembering.
Downtown Chicago, moving fast beneath his wheels, the city an open system of possibilities and obstacles. The streets became a proving ground, a classroom with no walls, where the lesson was always the same—commit or fall.
Skating was never just skating.
It was learning to eat failure, to throw yourself at the world and keep moving, to carve meaning into concrete, to build language through movement. And it wasn't just him—it was everyone.
Kids from the city, from the suburbs, from nowhere and everywhere, all bound by the same devotion:
To the perfect line.
To the sound of urethane kissing pavement.
To the rush of landing something clean after a hundred slams.
Londo Mondo was the sanctuary.
A Gold Coast skate shop that wasn't just a store but a place to belong.
Norma would drop him off there every day after school, leaving him in the care of the culture, trusting that it would raise him well. Sometimes, he'd take the bus from Hyde Park just to soak it all in. To sit in front of the same looping skate videos, rewinding, rewatching, memorizing every flick, every motion, every name that mattered.
Because learning the culture was as important as existing in it.
And this Metra station?
This was the portal.
It carried him and his friends between worlds—out of their neighborhoods, out of the gravitational pull of gang affiliations, out of the predestined routes laid before them. Not that the weight of the city disappeared, but it loosened, just enough, when they were moving fast, when they were grinding ledges instead of grinding each other down.
And now—he's back.
Not as a skater, not as a kid looking for an escape, but as a son on his way to see his mother who is in ICU in a University of Chicago hospital.
And in that moment, the contrast is sharp.
The woman who raised him, a brilliant Black woman who had lived through the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s—a world that made no space for her curiosity, no room for her intellect, no clear paths forward.
And yet, she built a path anyway.
She pushed open doors that weren't meant to be opened for people like her. She carved out a reality where her son could move freely, where he could be creative, where he could push into spaces that were denied to her.
And now, he's walking through those spaces, carrying her lessons, her vision, her sacrifice in his body.
The train pulls in. The doors slide open.
vyle. steps inside, carrying all of it with him.