Old lives

April 13, 2020 | Philadelphia | 20-29 years

I returned to the city in Romania where I was living before the outbreak. I ran into a bunch of people (not friends) from my American high school English class who were all living in Romania since the outbreak began. They wore aprons and were working at the coffee/salad place I liked. I asked why they were open because they had closed down because of the virus before I moved back to the States. They said the city had cut itself off from the rest of the world because they had zero cases. We could do anything as long as we stayed within the city limits. Then it was nighttime. My Romanian friends and I walked around the streets, which had merged to be parts of Cluj-Napoca but also parts of North Philadelphia. We ate Crown Chicken on a bench outside a famous communist memorial and cried for our old lives.