The dream was always the same. Set in a gray miasma straight out of Ingmar Bergman, there was not so much sight as sound; an endless clanking, like the way the radiators in her parents house used to clank and bang on the first cold day of fall, when she was a child. A shrill whining, like the badly-worn brakes on the bus she used to take to work. And behind it all, a dim chorus that sounded like hundreds of people chanting in the distance; “Si, se puede! Si, se puede! Si, se puede…”

Her eyes blinked open, alighting on the first rays of dim winter morning sun filtering through the windowshades onto the wall, reflecting wanly off the indifferently-white paint on the wall, welcoming Julia to another day.

Her foot stuck out from under the quilt – but just for the moment for Julia to register that Christ, it’s cold out here. She could barely remember feeling warm, at least not in this apartment – she shuddered at the thought of the electrical bills she was paying, had always paid, ever since 2021 when she got her first job out of college in time for the “Green New Deal” to pass. Bundle up for the planet, she thought, laconically remembering the slogans that first winter, four years ago.

She shook it out of her head and pulled her foot back under the quilt.

She heard a brief “snork” of a cough from the other half of the bed. Her boyfriend of six months, Ian Joshua Kohlman, was still sleeping. Julia thought about curling up closer to him for a little warmth, before ruefully remembering that he – who graduated the previous spring from the U of M School of Social Justice and Victimology Studies, the first class to go all the way through their master’s degree completely free of tuition, and had just been laid off from his job as an associate barrista, just wasn’t very warm. She looked at his scraggly mop of hair, gathered into a greasy man-bun at the back of his scalp, and thought “I have no idea where we’re going to make up the $15 an hour we’re losing now“, before sadly wanly hoping he’s have better luck looking for a job in his field, and life’s passion, of social justice activism through performance art, and silently doubting it, noting how little use she’d gotten from her free birth control in the past two months – partly from Ian’s depression, which his friends told Julia had always been a facet of his personality, but had gotten worse as his job search dragged on and on.

Slowly, the sounds started filtering in from the units above and below the third-floor appartment in southwest MInneapolis that Julia and Ian shared. The neighbors downstairs were chasing their three (she guessed) children around trying to get them ready for school The neighbors on the other side of the bedroom wall were apparently having a spirited argument about their toothbrushes. And the neighbors above, apparently, were Ukraining clog dancers doing their morning warmups. A couple of teenagers were bellowing at each other in the hallway outside. Through the frosty bedroom window looking out over Queen Street, an MTC bus stopped for a passenger in a wheelchair – the steady beep beep beep beep beep beep of the alarm shaking the last of her 6:30 AM cobwebs away.

Julia lay for a moment, before realizing the day wasn’t going to live itself. She mentally counted down “Three – Two – One“, and slid out from under the covers, her slim figure draped in long underwear and a sweatshirt against the cold that the quilt could never quite smother. She grabbed a top, some underwear and a pair of jeans from her closet, and two-stepped to the bathroom, shivering, turning on the water, putting her hands underneath the unsatisfying stream, waiting for just enough warmth to justify jumping out of her bed-clothes quickly, in time to warm up a bit before the stream of luke-hot hot water from the unit’s “eco-friendly” water heater turned luke-cool, then cold. She felt her opporunity, and showered and washed her hair quickly.

But not quick enough, the stream turning uncomfortably frigid as she rinsed. She gritted her teeth and finished before jumping out, drying off as fast as she could, shivering, and getting dressed.

She stepped back into the bedroom and grabbed her coat, seeing the “Che Guevara” t-shirt that, she wistfully remembered, Ian had been wearing when they met.

“No time for regrets“, she thought, pulling on her stocking cap and walking through the kitchenette. “The sink is dripping, the fridge is fridging even less well than usual, and the window insulation is leaky“, she thought, grabbing a cricket and quinoa bar, wondering what they were getting for their $1,800 a month for the one-bedroom apartment.

She fished the keys out of her purse and walked out into the hallway, the teenagers still bellowing nonsense at each other from opposite ends of the hall, and walked to the elevator, stabbing the button with her finger as the teenagers obscene chatter got faster and louder. Finally, the door opened, and she got into the car going down.

A man from a higher floor was standing in the corner of the elevator car. A vague feeling of unease tugged at the corner of her consciousness – the man, in his fifties, always smelled a little of booze and decay, and always left her feeling uneasy – a feeling that, unbeknownst to her, was utterly justified, as he leered at his young neighbor, not really worrying in his somewhere-between-drunk-and-hung-over haze if she noticed or not, as the elevator – which, although ten years old, was already showing its age – lurched to a stop on the first floor. Julia stepped out quickly, turning to walk to the lobby.

She paused for a moment, pulling her wool cap, scarf and gloves, the smells of the lobby – cooking, cigarettes and a faint waft of urine tickling the edges of her senses as they did every morning. “This was supposed to be a nice building”, Julia though – and then remembered, “It is“.

She looked out the glass door, feeling the chill radiating into the lobby from the murky dawn-ish outdoors as the stiff February breezed pushed against the building’s facade, trying to exert mother nature’s control over the high-density urban landscape. Julia thought about taking a sick day, briefly – but the reflection of the guy from the higher floor gave her the motivation to push through.

There’d been a snowstorm three days before. Julia trudged through the snow, on the sidewalk that hadn’t been shoveled since the snowstorm two days earlier. The sky was still twi-dawn dark, but promised to be clear and mercilessly post-blizzard cold, Julia though, walking down Queen to get to the bus station, walking through the single-file groove the other people on the street had left yesterday, packed and a little treacherous, walking to the Yellow Line station.

She crossed the street without thinking too hard about it – there were few cars in this inner-city neighborhood, and the little glorified lawn mowers that a few people did have, jammed into the limited parking on the “new urbanist” street, didn’t fare well on streets that hadn’t seen a snowplow yet, and likely wouldn’t – and walked up the long ramp to the train platform, which was still slick and icy from the storm, “and most likely will be until the sun melts it in a few months“, Julia thought. A couple of drunk men were loudly arguing down at the other end of the platform, as about a half dozen other people huddled against the cold, hoping to be left alone.

“Yellow Line – next train six minutes” said the LED sign, the one of three on the platform that still worked. “Great“, Julia thought, as she wedged into the plexiglas shelter and hit the “heat” button, her face briefly tilting upward, hoping for a ray or two of warmth from the french-fry-warmer style light that blinked on above, discretely trying to keep the two loud drunks just inside the corner of her vision. “Every f****ng morning“, she thought, letting the thought tail off, silently trying to scrape a piece of cricket bar off her teeth with her tongue. The platform had been getting worse and worse, even in this “good” neighborhood of southwest Minneapolis – but a wave of muggings, assaults, rapes and general bad behavior had followed the completion of the Yellow Line a few years earlier.

“Still, better than trying to drive ,or waiting on a bus“, she thought, shuddering at what some of her former co-workers had paid for parking downtown, back when there was still parking downtown.

She startled from her reverie as a Yellow Line train rounded the bend and pulled up to the platform. She pressed the door button, and the door slid open. Julia stepped inside…

…and looked, in vain, for a seat. They were all full – about half with commuters, huddled up, grateful to finally be out of the cold for the next 20 minutes; the rest with the same crowd of homeless men, sleeping, sometimes across a couple of seats. One, half-awake, smoked a cigarette, the smoke causing Julia’s throat to itch and stifle a cough. She grabbed a hold bar and held on, waiting for the train to lurch forward.

But the lurch didn’t come. The drunks stood in the doorway at the other end of the car, carrying on their argument as the wave of cold washed back over the packed commuters, the shapeless slurry of words lost in the muted wave of groaning before the drunk stepped back to the platform.

The train finally lurched forward. A mostly-empty vodka bottle rolled down the aisle – from the smell of the car, much of it had already spilled.

But for the next 90 seconds, until the train got to its next stop, there’d be a little warmth – broken eight times by the doors sliding open at each stop as the Yellow Line wended its way downtown. As the train crossed a freeway bridge, it ground to a halt. “Not again“, Julia groaned, as commuter heads shook with resigned frustration.

Finally, the train pulled into the Warehouse District station. A short, sharp eddy of wind greeted Julia as she stepped onto the platform, stripping away the little coccoon of smoky, vodka-tinged warmth of the train, as she walked toward her office, the chilly staccato of her gait mirrored by the other commuters, and contrasting with the tentative amble of the homeless and the hung over.

“Haaaaaay, you got a dollar? My sister’s car broke down, and her daughter is with her out on the freeway”, a panhandler slurred as Julia walked down the ramp.

“Sorry, no cash”, she murmured through er scarf as she moved, just a little faster.

It was a Monday. Julia, a web designer, had a big project presentation at 2PM. It was going to be a long morning.