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The Files

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The Summer of Hidden Happiness

I spent my summer alternating between sweating in a studio apartment on the edge of south Oakland and sweating in a Mexican bar/restaurant in the South Side. Pittsburgh, you have made me sweat this summer. Pittsburgh you have given me cotton candy sunsets and old Italian neighbors and my summer on my own. My little apartment was my solace, it was entirely mine. It was my blank canvas. I could eat just the cookie dough out of the cookie dough ice cream and no one could yell at me. I could go to bed at 9 o’clock or at 3 in the morning.

Yet at the same time, it wasn’t mine at all. That studio apartment in that building on Atwood Street was my father’s and my sister’s and as I spent a sweaty evening taking my pictures off the wall, I listened to Bruce Springsteen. It seems crazy to me that a place, just plain old brick and mortar can make you feel closer to a person, or people. I have always been very sentimental about places – their significance lives in those bricks. They become a tangible thing that holds your memories inside of it.

If the walls of Atwood could talk, they would tell you partial stories of my family. Details of my sister’s first apartment, of my first apartment and how forever, that building will hold a special memory for us.

I would like to call this the summer of hidden happiness. Nothing particularly large happened, but many small, important things did. These small memories of happiness are some of those things that you remember deep in the throes of January when the sun hasn’t been out in five days and you crave that humidity. Things like the birthday party my sister and brother-in-law threw for their puppy’s first birthday, meeting the woman who places Roxie on Broadway in Chicago, meeting my family at the lake for the fourth.

It’s these things that get us through the winter.

These small memories and this summer itself I feel I have grown as a person. Being back on the Bluff feels like coming home again in the most magical way. But my sweaty little place in Oakland was also home, if only for a short amount of time.

-H


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