Quieter now

March 21, 2023

Quieter now

I’ve been feeling a little taken aback by the lack of comment on the three-year anniversary of the start of the pandemic this past week. I mean, I know we’re all tired of hearing about it, of thinking about it. Maybe it’s just that everyone feels like what could possibly be said has been said. But it feels somehow more significant to me than the second, or even the first, when we were still very, very much in the worst of it than we are now.

Three years since the world just stopped. Since I got a last drink with a friend at my favorite bar, had a last shift at work before they called off the rest of the school year, bought a last book at our local bookstore because there was a real chance, within the next day or two, that I wouldn’t be able to for a long, long time.

I sit finishing a cup of coffee by the back window of my apartment, where I watched so much of the past three years go by. It’s quiet out now, mostly because people are at work, or working from home, not huddled in their apartments afraid of dying by breathing the air outside. Strangely I remember those first days as so noisy, even though the streets were empty. Other people say they remember the constancy of the ambulance sirens. I remember the constant phone calls, text message notification chimes, news on the radio, Governor Cuomo’s daily press conferences, the inescapable sounds of three people more or less trapped in a tiny apartment together, of people moving out as other residents fled the building. Of a crescendo of fear and anxiety more than any literal sound.

I wore my noise canceling headphones more or less constantly at home once my roommates got up in the mornings and before they both left town for the duration of that spring and summer. I’d taken to getting up at 6:00 AM not only to go outside for a walk before there were almost any other humans in the park, but just to get a couple of hours of quiet to read in before the rest of the building woke up.

It’s quiet now. Trees with reddish buds are starting to wake, giving a faint rosy glow to the afternoon. The park is just barely veiled in pale green. The sky is bright cornflower blue. Starlings and chickadees are singing.

I won’t say things feel more normal this year, but they feel different. Quieter.

Like the world is finally taking a breath.

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