The "Windy City" Was a Breath of Fresh Air

The “Windy City” was a breath of fresh air. We all need a weekend in a different place, with different people, doing different things. I find myself not even wanting to share about my trip to Chicago, because I just want to keep it close to my heart. I don’t know how or why but something clicked and I came back to Cleveland at 2 am on a Monday morning, having to be up for work just 4 hours later, feeling like a completely new person.

I fell in love. Not with an incredibly good looking man, Chicago is full of them, but with the city, with life, with the people in my life, and I’m even starting to love myself again.

The weekend wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. We did the touristy things, we even spent an entire day shopping, we watched Netflix, we napped, attended happy hours, had fancy dinners, we got sweaty and irritated, our feet bled. It was a typical weekend of tourists in a city.

What was not so typical was the way that people went out of their way to be with my sister and me during our time there. Our friend from when we were just kids running around the neighborhood smelling like dirt and cookies, woke up at the ass crack of dawn to pick us up from the airport, a friend from school brought a 16 piece cooking set to happy hour and dinner because she was out running errands but still made the time to be there, our cousin who goes to Northwestern hopped on a train with two of her friends after a long day of class and work just to see us, and one of my dearest friends drove into the city to have dinner with us. In the middle of dinner she even pulled out of her purse a bag full of cookies that she had baked. [Which we scarfed down at the airport and held up the entire security line because we didn’t know solid food could go through TSA. We found this out when airport security called us out in front of everyone.]

And, I will not forget to mention our friend who hosted us. She never complained once as we showed up to her apartment and completely took over, I’ll leave it at “Three girls, one weekend, and all of their shoes”. Thank you.

People are so good. And maybe these things are just so microscopic to them on the large scale of life. But to me, these are the big things that I will always remember.
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Chicago, the “Windy City”, you were unforgettable, truly a breath of fresh air that I’m glad I took in, because sometimes in this crazy life we forget that we need to just keep breathing. 

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