What Living in NYC During Coronavirus Is Making Clear

New York City is one of my favorite places on the planet. That being said, right now, it is not my favorite place.

New York is currently the US epicenter of the Coronavirus. The streets are basically empty—and those who are out on the streets don't feel as safe. One thing that is like a balm to anxiety in a big city like New York, is the fact that there are usually always other people around. But that is not the case anymore.

There’s tape in the grocery store to keep people on line six feet apart. Most businesses’ doors are shuttered, and my local bodega man looks like he’s one step from buying a hazmat suit. There is no laughter on first dates in Central Park. There are no old friends meeting for wine and cheese at bars. There are no late nights where we watch the sunrise from the Brooklyn Bridge after dancing until our feet were sore.

There are only women on street corners sobbing into their phones, cars with loud radios playing the news that I’m trying to avoid. There are long hours alone to think about where we’re at in life, and to grieve how many lives are being utterly changed with no chance of returning to any sense of normal. All around me, the city is grieving, and I don’t have to do anything to feel that or to know that—it’s like it’s in the air around us at all times.

I haven't left my house in nearly 4 weeks—which is a privilege I'm aware I get to have since my job can be done remotely. At 7 o'clock, windows in my neighborhood open and people cheer into the night, banging pans with wooden spoons to thank our healthcare workers—but in other parts of the city, there is no cheering. There is only fear, anxiety, and the virus.

So much needs to change. Every person I've spoken with has personally reached a point where they can't continue with the same lifestyle, same job, some insecurities that have kept them small in recent years. And in a broader scale, our institutions need to be rebuilt from the ground up. We need to find the balance between taking care of our communities and taking care of ourselves.

There is no cheering in some parts of New York because the personal suffering is too great, and communal grieving isn't something that can really be done in the same ways right now, even though grieving as a community is central to being human.

I'll say it again: so much needs to change. Our institutions need to be pulled apart and rebuilt. We need to bring POC and disadvantaged people into our policy-making, and we need to take care of each other too. We can't just focus on being fine ourselves.

We can't keep pretending that we don't owe each other anything. We can't ignore the vulnerable and think that, that protects us from similar fates. Anything can happen to anyone at any time. May the coronavirus teach us that, and may we internalize the fear that some of our citizens live with day in and day out, despite working as hard as they can, making as many sacrifices as they can.

We need to open ourselves up to our communities. We need to learn to rely on each other, to take care of each other, to connect to something larger than ourselves and to change our habits or our focus to serve our communities. Our government should be working to protect us. It shouldn’t be shoving us into the ground and saying, “good luck.”