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The answer I’ve been giving and receiving most this past month when asked how I am is “highs and lows, highs and lows.” Is there any other way to describe April?

While March felt like sudden whiplash with the world shutting down practically over night, April instead felt more like a reckoning with the longevity of the pandemic and its effects, of big questions and new needs, and trying to navigate what my new now looks like.

I am often asked what New York City is like right now and I feel like my answers always fall short. They fall short because I am deeply privileged during this time, with a job that easily transitioned into working from home and a grocery store around the corner that doesn’t have too long of lines, which means I am rarely leaving my neighborhood, no longer taking the subway or Lyfts, and trying to avoid crowded spaces as much as possible. Easier said than done in New York but like everyone else, I’m trying.

On good days, I treat myself to walking into neighborhoods a few miles away, and on the best days, my feet get to enjoy their old routine of finding their way to the water where we peer at Manhattan across the river. Seeing her there but not being able to travel over, it feels like missing an old friend. She looks oddly quiet as I take her in from Brooklyn, and I find myself missing most the afternoons I would spend reading on a bench in the sun while drinking tea on the Promenade.

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