It is Day 4 of the state-enforced lockdown.

A couple of days ago I went to buy groceries. I live in the kind of neighborhood that is half-ignored by the civic agency that’s in charge and half-bougie central. So you walk out of a road that will possibly never be paved in your lifetime to a road with a doughnut shop whose interior and menu seem culled right out of a Pinterest board and a cutesy names generator.

It was disconcerting to walk around the block. I realized how much other people on the street instill a sense of fear as well as a sense of false security. Stripped of both, I was very uncomfortably aware of how alone I was, how weird it was to walk on patches of the pavement without any witnesses. And like every day, the people of this city who have to work, who have nowhere to go to where out: the fruit vendors, the panhandlers, the children who are always on the road, always selling or asking for something, who will continue to be there while we lock ourselves up indoors, afraid of ourselves and our bodies and one another.