The Last Normal Day
I have lived through two seismic, catastrophic events in New York, almost twenty years apart. 9/11 felt out of nowhere - a sudden, pure shock. A random Tuesday morning where we all gaped, disbelieving, at plumes of smoke against a cobalt sky where the big twins once stood.
COVID happened gradually, then all at once. Four years ago this week, just before everything shut down, we were stupidly still taking the subway to work. Super Tuesday had just happened, where I wept on the N train platform listening to Elizabeth Warren’s speech as she bowed out of the big race. On my last day in the office, I went to Starbucks, and they had taken the milk station away, with a note saying that you had to ask for sugar and milk from the barista, to prevent the spread. Later that evening, I met up with friends for a beer, so profound was my denial. We joked around with each other as we said our goodbyes, see you never, I guess! The next morning, I was notified that we would be working from home for the foreseeable future.
The Last Normal Day.
There was unity in the city during COVID, the same way there was after 9/11, a unity I’d hoped to never feel again. When shit gets real, you become aware of people in a way the city usually disallows. This awareness binds us, and makes us a little bit kinder for a while. Softer. There are more niceties and pleasantries than usual. The first time someone was rude to me again after 9/11, I felt relieved. All of this niceness - not to be confused with kindness, we have more kind people here than you could ever imagine - felt like everyone had been forced to use a foreign language.
When ten million people are mostly nice to each other, it's not entirely by choice. To survive here, you have to shut out the fact that you and ten million other people are existing in the same place on the same day, within mere square miles. You learn to pick your battles. If you try to take it all in, really notice everyone you see every day, you’ll drown in it. But this city rallies when the chips are down. We come together because we have to. It would be chaos if we didn’t - and I mean actual chaos, not the invented chaos that Fox News sells a dying generation.
When I had to start going back into the office in late 2021, I was not ready. Most of the people I knew were still working from home. I remember feeling like I had just been watching the world in some abstract hazy film, and now I was just floating around in some half nightmare. I felt like a hostage in my own apartment, and yet, I did not want to leave it. I was agoraphobic and claustrophobic at the same time. The energy in the city was erratic and feral, and there wasn’t a rhythm I could grab onto.
After you’ve lived here for a while, the rhythms of the city become innate. It’s how we weave by the thousands in the concourse of Grand Central, wordless flocks of birds, all in different directions, rarely colliding. You only notice it on a day when your rhythm and the city don't match up, and you miss your train by a half second, or you bump into people, or your coffee lid pops off and spills all over you, or you can’t get your MetroCard to swipe and jam yourself straight into the turnstile. Mornings like that remind you that you are a part of an ecosystem, and if you aren’t up to snuff that day, it simply goes on without you and tosses you around until you head home, dejected, and look at Hudson Valley real estate on Zillow.
I rode an electric Citibike to work whenever it was nice out. I learned a new rhythm, one that came with new things to be afraid of besides this invisible plague. There was an immediacy to weaving through the streets of the city, dodging delivery mopeds and cars and off-leash dogs. I had the simple goal of not becoming roadkill on the way to work and back, and weirdly, I found it very centering. My overdeveloped nervous system had nowhere to put all of this survival instinct, and it gave me an outlet. Every morning, when I got up to the crest of the bridge and that spectacular view of Manhattan came into sight, I said “Good morning, East River. Good morning, skyline”. It was my little prayer to the city I was traveling into and missed desperately, all at the same time.
It’s too dangerous to ride a bike into midtown now. Last year saw a record number of cycling deaths. The last time I rode a bike across the bridge, I was flanked by two men on literal motorcycles, who yelled sexually explicit things at me before recklessly speeding off, barely dodging oncoming bikes. The Queensboro Bridge bike path is not even ten feet wide, with two lanes for cyclists and one for pedestrians. Nothing is done about this. The cops are more interested in ticketing cyclists who dare to turn right onto a protected bike lane before the light entirely changes. Or they are on their phones, as usual, not paying any attention.
Everything is more aggressive now, and it's not just here in the city. There is less patience, less consideration, less kindness. There is an empathy deficit. People abuse flight attendants, throw things at cashiers, harass trans and non binary children, mock the disabled, shun immigrants, pull out guns in department store parking lots. There are fewer “third” spaces than ever to gather, and we grow increasingly isolated, glued to our screens. There is a menace to social interaction now, whether real or imagined, and our nervous systems are responding in kind. I’d blame it on the rise in right wing politics, or encroaching authoritarianism, but I am seeing it everywhere, on all sides of the political spectrum. It’s as if there was a virus on the loose, long before COVID, and the two dovetailed, infecting everyone and everything.
The first year of COVID was terrifying on a level I’ve never experienced, and somehow, we are all expected to function like that terror hadn’t burrowed deep in our bodies. Who is better than they were four years ago, really? We are all older. If we had am existing mental or physical illness, it got worse. We were acting like people who thought they were going to die, and there was no clear moment when we could stop acting like people who thought they were going to die, because even though it’s fewer than it was, people are still dying. There was no moment where things were back to “normal”.
There is no normal. There is only this.
People have returned to the city. It’s still not as crowded as it used to be, but it's getting there. I am astonished daily by the amount of people I see coughing or sneezing on the train, without even a suggestion of a mask, as if nothing ever happened. As far as some people are concerned, it didn’t. A virus turned into a political football. Capitalism sent us back into office buildings before we were physically or emotionally ready. Isolation and political unrest made us cagey. Unresolved grief made us fragile, reactive, and sometimes cruel.
We are facing the very real possibility that we will be living under a dictatorship in less than a year’s time. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. It was my own brand of American myopia that kept me from seeing it coming years before I did. Read any history book, and there is precedent for what is happening right now.
We are a young country with a goldfish memory. We preach that we should “Never Forget”, but we always, always manage to. The country that “Never Forgot” remained more than willing to let the “heroes” of 9/11 suffer with cancer and other diseases from toxic exposures until a TV show host fought a years long battle to get them basic funding.
I imagine something similar will happen when the long term effects of multiple reinfections of a novel coronavirus make themselves more known. Long COVID has already hobbled a nice chunk of the population. The same arrogance and greed that sent us all back downtown into acrid air that glittered with metal in 2001 is the same drive that propels us now, into whatever comes next.
I used to ask myself - What did we learn from all of this?
The better question is - What do we ever learn, really, in this country?