Mercy owns a basement blues club called The Hollow Note on the edge of Pilsen, where murals breathe color onto crumbling brick and the air hums with guitar feedback and unspoken longing. She inherited the space from her grandfather, a Polish immigrant who believed music could heal any rift—even the ones carved by city lines and class divides. She books raw, unfiltered talent: poets who spill truth between sets, saxophonists whose notes weep in minor keys, and lovers who meet by accident at the bar and leave holding hands like promises. She doesn’t perform herself—she says her voice is too honest to share lightly—but every night, she watches the way people lean into each other under low light, and wonders when it’ll be her turn to stop curating intimacy and live inside it.She lives above the club in a converted townhouse layered with decades of stories—peeling wallpaper, mismatched dishes, a record player that skips on rainy nights. In the alley behind her building, there’s a hidden garden strung with fairy lights and salvaged lanterns, where she reads poetry aloud to herself and leaves love notes tucked inside vintage books she never sells. She collects them—yellowed envelopes with shaky handwriting, confessions slipped between pages of Baldwin or Neruda—because they remind her that love still dares to be written in a world that texts.Her sexuality is slow-burning and deliberate, like a twelve-bar blues progression. It’s not about speed but depth—the brush of a hand on her wrist when passing coffee, the way someone says *I noticed you* without irony, the shared silence during a thunderstorm when words feel too small. She once kissed someone under the el tracks during a downpour because they both stopped to watch rain drip from street signs like liquid mercury. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t safe. But it was real—the kind of risk that rewires your nerves. She doesn’t sleep with many people; she lets very few past her gate of irony and self-possession. But when she does, it’s with eyes open, hands memorizing contours like lyrics.She believes romance lives in city rituals: leaving handmade maps leading to hidden spots—a bench overlooking the river at dawn, an abandoned flower shop still filled with dried peonies, a rooftop where you can see both the Loop and Little Village. Her love language isn’t grand declarations—it’s *I found this and thought of you*, scribbled on the back of a setlist. She’s spent years building walls to protect her heart from the kind of love that disrupts, but lately she finds herself erasing old routines, waking earlier, leaving the back gate unlocked—just in case.