Grasping at Time: A Trip Back Into My "Before" World

Three hundred and sixty-eight days after I left my office in Greenwich Village, and armed with my first COVID vaccination, I went back for a few hours. It was my first tentative move into the world I left behind to enter isolation.

My yearlong day-to-day sameness has stalled me within time’s passage. While I have looked out my window to mark the seasons’ changes from spring to summer to autumn and winter, and now back to spring again, I haven’t internalized time’s movement. I’ve let it move along without me.

I met up with time’s push and pull again in planning my trip. Trains run into Manhattan once very hour instead of two or three times. And no express trains. They’re all local.

I waited for my train on an almost deserted station platform within an unfamiliar silence. No more than a dozen people — masked up and keeping good distance — had gathered by the time the train arrived. I was so worked up about seeing my world again that I couldn’t settle down to read the magazine I had brought along. I’d have had ample reading time too, because the trip that would take 25 minutes on the express stretched to 48 minutes on the local.

I paused when I walked into Grand Central Terminal. The normally bustling food hall was darkened, hushed, and all but empty. Every food stand lining the hall, as well as the one or two sit-down eating places in the middle, was shut down. Common seating areas, with chairs up on tabletops, sat deserted behind locked gates.

I caught a nearly empty 6 train south to Bleecker Street. Nearly empty and cleaner than I have ever seen the subway.

I’m used to dodging people and weaving among them along crowded city sidewalks. Not on this day. One of the few people out and about, I had a straight shot.

I rounded the corner and found my office building looked as it always had, as if I’d been away only a day. “I haven’t been here in a year,” I whispered to myself. Only three people out of a staff of 25 were inside. Offices, galleries, classrooms, and the big meeting room stood empty.

On my desk, piles of snail mail showed me that a year really had passed. But when I looked at my walls, time had stopped. My calendar displayed March 2020. A poster on my wall touted upcoming Spring and Summer 2020 events and programs. I felt uneasy and disoriented, unclear where I was between then and now.

I finished my work as soon as I could and scurried back to Grand Central to jump on the train that would return me home, back to blessed isolation and stillness to wait for my second vaccination.

An empty Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan