In the heart of a city, there was a silence that I had never noticed before. The pandemic had transformed bustling streets into hushed avenues, where the echoes of my footsteps seemed to carry more weight than they used to.
It was during one of these late-night walks, a simple conversation cracked the window into a world I thought I knew.
“It’s not safe anymore, even just walking home,” I remarked casually to a colleague after a long shift at the hotel. It was a routine comment, the kind we make when the world seems a bit off its axis. She chuckled, not out of amusement, but with a tinge of irony, and replied, “Welcome to my world, where it’s never been safe, pandemic or no pandemic.”