By the time you read this, I will be gone. I have left you. Our whirlwind five-year romance has come to a bittersweet end. You are stunned and heartbroken, I know; you will sulk for years, perhaps forever, and wonder “why, oh why has Joe left me?” But you know, just as I do, that it was not meant to be. The problems in our relationship were legion:

1. Weather. It was your decision to turn yourself every winter into a desolate wasteland of bitter cold and ice. I’m sure you thought that was funny, watching your people scurry to and fro for seven months out of the year. I’m sure you got a kick out of the arctic wind barreling down Jackson Avenue. Maybe you thought the piles of dirt-streaked snow lining my sidewalk were hysterical. I’m sure you enjoyed the sweltering swamp-like humidity for the other five months out of the year. In our five years together, you granted me maybe ten days of good weather. It was your decision to cast the sky in endless gray clouds for the entirety of every January. You have the coldest winters and the hottest summers on earth; you are the worst of both worlds.
2. Parking. For the outrageous sum of $119 annually, you granted me the privilege of parking my car in your so-called “street parking”. But then you closed my street every week for your “street cleaning” and your “construction”. You sent your police officers to give me parking tickets for such heinous crimes as “no front license plate”, when the plate on the back was perfectly there. You even towed me once, because you were “filming a movie”. I paid you for parking; Batman did not.
3. The Chicago Transit Authority. Of all the evils I was subject to while living with you, none compare to the paltritude of your “CTA”. How long did you think I would tolerate your buses that were two hours late every day? Did you think it was funny when your employees didn’t clean up the urine that streaked the cars of your subway trains? Did you laugh when your people were trapped in your trains during the summer, with no air, sitting motionless on the track “waiting for signals ahead?” You are not laughing now, you bitch, for I am gone, and your CTA is but a distant memory.
4. Ineptitude. You, not I, hired complete and total morons to support your decaying infrastructure. Perhaps you were being kind, offering positions of authority to people who can’t read. But that posed a problem, as you know, when I wanted to renew my license, or buy a parking permit. And your “police”, who swore to “serve and protect”, were more often there to “harass and annoy”. You sent them to patrol the streets every day with their “ticket machines”.
5. Stupid laws. You banned cell phones in cars, smoking in bars, and fois gras. Your “city council” ignored the problems facing you and focused instead on the most inane regulations in the world. You made yourself the laughing stock of the nation when you outlawed goose liver because you were concerned about geese who don’t live there. Your politicians are worthless, Chicago, and in our five years together did nothing to improve you at all.

You were too cold, too hot, too loud, too crowded, too humid, too poor, too rich, too fat, too flat, too cruel, and far, far too costly. You probably don’t want to know, in the misery-filled wake of my departure, that I have left you for a younger, sleeker, healthier partner that has none of your centuries-old crust. I left you for a younger girl, Chicago.

But I will miss you anyway. There is simply nothing like your Lincoln Park in the summer, with the beach on one side and the bars on the other. I will miss Kendalls, and Lincoln Station, and Kelsey’s, the places where you saw to it that I had plenty to drink. I will miss State Street at Christmas-time, and I will miss your countless parties, festivals and parades. You are New York without the attitude, and Los Angeles without the fake. You are the greatest city on earth. But, it turns out, I’m just not a city guy.

It’s not you, it’s me.

Someday, you will meet a guy who deserves you, a guy who doesn’t mind your countless idiosyncracies that drove me mad. You will be happy again, Chicago, I promise. We had some good times, you and I. But those times are over. It didn’t work out between us, but somewhere out there is your Prince Charming, just waiting to be wrapped in your cold, steel embrace.

I’m sorry things didn’t work out. And, um, don’t bother to call.