Dept. of Returns

In March, 2020, a pandemic swept through our lives and took with it the world we knew. We dispersed, indefinitely: some of us kept going to work, in emergency rooms and in day-care centers and on delivery bikes, facing new dangers, while the rest of us holed up inside our homes. In New York, refrigerated trucks hummed ominously outside our overwhelmed hospitals; tents sprang up in Central Park, as if we were at war. For weeks, the streets were empty, the quiet broken only by a nightly ruckus, when people leaned out of apartment windows to blow horns and bang spoons against pots. Public life reawakened in fits and starts, in masked masses in the streets, in lines at polling places, in the freighted reopening of restaurants and stores.

Now we find ourselves at an entirely different moment, one of cautious optimism, of reëmergence. We register the unmasked faces of strangers. We breathe easier around one another. We go out dancing. There may never be a clear-cut ending to the pandemic, when it fades entirely into memory. But, as vaccination rates climb, and the virus loses its grip on us, we are easing back into something like the world we left behind.

—The Editors