Items

• 2020-03-23

  Solid Wall of (No) Sound

  I was a college student during the initial phases of the pandemic. Classes were moved to all online, and I moved out of the dorm back home, since most of the campus was closed. My most distinct memory of the time is of walking my dog on the first Monday morning of the lockdown. The world was so still. The only soft noises that could be heard were birds chirping and squirrels chittering to each other as they ran around. I lived right next to a major road, so the sudden silence was almost oppressive. That vacuum of sound was the loudest thing I heard on the walk, and it came with the sudden awareness that the area I was walking in was completely alien to the one I had grown up in. I have visited home again since then, but have been completely unable to ever capture that eerie feeling again. It felt special, like a completely ethereal place in time that would never be recreated again.