PART ONE
It was January 2020.
The winter had been kind to us in New York City. I almost missed the snow—but then I reminded myself that it would come. Whether it would be next week or sometime in March, New York would see another snow. She always does.
We were leaving a friend’s apartment in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn and dispersing for the night. The streets were lined with four- and five-story brick walk-ups from the early 1900s. There’s a decorative trim on the top of these buildings that mark them as being from a different, more fanciful era. Then, a little further down the road, we ran into the classic Brooklyn brownstones, with their steep staircases and massive wooden doors.
For me, there is no finer place to walk.
Through unemployment, through drunken laughter, through tears, through screams of Broadway musicals—I’ve lived 10 years of life with the streets of New York and her boroughs as my background. Some of these very blog posts came from notes on my phone, as I was hopping from one avenue to the next, brimming with energy and the need to control restless thoughts. Strolling through cities both excites my mind and gives me a sense of peace. It’s the only way I can fully commit to doing two things at once: walking and talking, walking and listening, or walking and recording what I see.
I don’t know what that says about my personality, but it pleases me immensely to succeed in multitasking.
The walk in Cobble Hill that night was really no walk at all. We were simply lallygagging to the top of the street to catch a cab. Someone mentioned the Coronavirus in passing. At the time, it was a distant concern—a “flu-like” virus that jumped from an animal in Wuhan, China to a human sometime before the Christmas holidays. The reports sounded troubling and mysterious, but I remembered SARS. That illness had arrived a short time after 9-11 and was disastrous in certain countries. Still... from my middle school memories? Only a handful of Americans had contracted the virus. With that in mind, containment of the new Coronavirus seemed highly plausible.
Someone brought up a podcast on the topic; someone else mentioned an article from The New York Times about the conditions in China. Then Ubers were called, and the conversation ended. As we hugged our friends and slid into the backseat of a cab, my husband said, “What if this is like in the movies? What if this is like when they flashback to a time before ‘the virus?’ And we’re all…”
Laughing.
Going to work.
Hugging each other.
It’s Day 17 of self-quarantine.
I think about the moment a lot.
But on the ride home that night, I remember thinking about the weather: When was it finally going to snow?
“If the event had not come to pass, these hints would have been forgotten, as thousands and millions of suggestions and supposition are now forgotten that were current at the period, but have been shown by time to be unfounded and so have been consigned to oblivion.”
Random snapshots from January, 2020
