No Sleep Til Brooklyn (Excerpt)

“That spring, as the weekly death tolls dropped and the temperature rose, Brooklyn was doing its best. Businesses did their best to come back to life. Restaurants and cafes all spilled out into the streets and did their best to look and feel clean and safe. Everyone did their best to act like the passing winter was just a glitch. We all pretended to hit the reset button, but there was still a suspicion to everything. The warmer weather and attempts at normality made life recognizable but somehow, none of it felt familiar.  The music had changed mid-dance over the winter.  The new regimen of safety and survival had quickly become muscle memory and this sudden slip back into time where people laughed and touched and leaned into each other to exchange stories over drinks no longer felt natural, though we all wanted it to. We could still do the dance, we all remembered the old choreography, but the rhythm was off. 

A short distance away from the social resurrection, a little further south, Coney Island still felt haunted despite the warmer weather. Roaming within eyeshot of the boardwalk and elevated train tracks, you could hear the ocean more distinctly, the specific tenor of the Atlantic waves hissing as they slid into Brooklyn in the absence of the usual buzzing choir of pedestrians.  There was curiosity in the quiet. When would things go back to normal? Would things go back to normal?  I wondered if I even wanted things to go back to normal…”