Theodore Benjamin Reeves was never meant to stay in his small Missouri town. Raised in the shadow of a hardware store and a father who spoke more in silence than words, he was expected to inherit a life of calloused hands and quiet resignation. But Theodore dreamed in cantilevers and prairie lines, worshipped Frank Lloyd Wright, and believed architecture could save him. So he fled to Chicago-the city he thought would see him, name him, make him whole. It didn't. This is the unflinching chronicle of thirteen years spent chasing a dream that never opened its doors. Theodore stumbles through failed relationships, burns out in high-end kitchens, and survives in a mold-ridden apartment with a knife-obsessed roommate and a radiator that screams through the night. He watches former lovers thrive without him, serves steaks to men who live the life he once imagined, and returns again and again to the Robie House, mourning the version of himself that never arrived. Yet through the bitterness and heartbreak, something fierce remains. A reckoning. A quiet defiance. Theodore learns that the dream was never the destination-it was the fire that kept him moving. In the ruins of ambition, he finds something unexpected: acceptance. This is not a story of triumph. It is a story of survival. Of a man who loses everything except the truth of who he is. And in that truth-raw, queer, and unrelenting-he discovers that failure, too, can be a kind of home.