Saying you miss the pandemic doesn't make a lot of sense but it's a sentiment that streaked across my thoughts the other day - not for the first time - when I noticed the Metro North getting as crowded as it was before and everyone acting as if the before times never happened. I definitely don't miss the news of all the people getting sick and the daily casualty numbers and the tragic stories. And I wish that I never got sick and had to deal with the long tail of its aftermath. It's something else. There's also a sub genre of thinking going around that the pandemic was all overblown and that wearing masks and staying home was some mass delusion foisted on the people from the governments and Big Pharma.  How quickly some forget and how much quicker others create an alternate reality. What I miss, or more accurately what I'm conscious of having lost is how life was framed differently for a while. On those empty trains and in the deserted streets there was an air of gravity. About what we did and what we had been given. There was on the one hand a communal feeling usually missing from the tiny individual struggles that now had been woven together to form something bigger. We were isolated in a new way but also linked. Things out of reach became more valued in our minds in the feeling they may have been altered or lost permanently. It was similar to the way the world looks more beautiful to you after you've had a health scare. Every molecule of your mundane existence shines brightly for a day or two until things gradually revert to normal. I remember the afternoon I was reassured about my eyesight at a vision institute after a worrying diagnosis and how beautiful and vivid the orange pumpkins were at a fall vegetable market in the glow of good news.

 In this midst of it I remember people checked in on each other and wondered how things had changed and what the new world might looked like. Then as soon as the coast seemed clear the talk turned to empty office buildings, the price of gas, and prosecuting Dr. Fauci. It all feels a bit like a half-remembered dream now.