There's a particular kind of quiet that settles over a city the morning after Christmas. The urgency has passed. The wrapping paper has been gathered. The meals have been eaten. And for one morning, at least, nobody has anywhere to be.

I found myself in that quiet yesterday, walking the streets of downtown Chicago while my wife was in surgery. Nothing serious, the doctors assured me. Routine, even. But there's no such thing as routine when it's someone you love on the table. So I did what I've always done when I need to think.. I walked.

The fog had rolled in overnight, thick enough to swallow the tops of buildings I've seen a thousand times. The city I know so well had become something else entirely. A place of suggestions and outlines, familiar shapes dissolving into gray just when you thought you had them figured out.

I crossed a bridge I've driven over countless times but never really looked at. In the darkness, with the wet pavement throwing back light, the old steel bones of the thing revealed themselves. Rivets and rust. A hundred years of holding weight. There's something reassuring about infrastructure that old, it's outlasted so much already.

The river was glass. The skyscrapers rose up and simply... stopped. Somewhere above me, floors I couldn't see were full of empty offices and conference rooms that wouldn't matter again until the new year. Down here, at street level, it was just me and the fog and the occasional boat waiting for passengers who wouldn't come today.

I walked until my phone buzzed. Surgery went well. She was awake. She was asking for me.

I turned back toward the hospital, the fog slightly beginning to lift, the city slowly returning to itself. But for a few hours that morning, I'd had Chicago all to myself. This vast, sprawling, impossible city reduced to whatever I could see ten feet in front of me.

Sometimes that's all any of us can see anyway.