Nothing But Air

By Rahul Abichandani             

  It could be felt before it was seen. March was an unexpected time for the world to suddenly turn to ashes, but that’s when it came to a hard halt and the streets got awfully quiet. Maybe not completely silent, as there was always a faint sound lingering to remind you that the world was in fact still moving—whether it be a low hum of a running refrigerator, a buzzing air conditioning unit, or distant sirens projecting through the sky. Nature still ran its course, birds still chirped, and winter still technically turned to spring. However, people were gone, or maybe we were the ones gone. Who knows.

    The news crushed the United States in distorted, fragmented pieces. A bat, or a market, or a cough in Wuhan, seemed like another foreign problem, well beyond the realm of our lives. Then it was your neighbor, a friend’s mother, a classmate’s cousin. All of a sudden we began refreshing death tolls every day like they were stocks—except there was no suspense or hope as to which direction they were going in. The red numbers were rising; the S&P 500 in freefall, while the global death total skyrocketed with no end in sight. 

    Remaining sane in the midst of a human catastrophe was next to impossible. The danger was everywhere, especially for the old, the sick, the already fragile—no family was immune from the terror. No one knew enough, as doctors were guessing, leaders were spinning, hospitals overflowed until people were dying in waiting rooms and on sidewalks. Some slipped away at home alone, breathless. So people coped however they could. They tried their best to pick up a new hobby or create a makeshift gym set-up in their home, to try to get something out of this disaster. We kids drowned in screens, gaming until sunrise, watching YouTube videos on loop—trying to find escape from the world that was burning just outside their windows.

    The streets emptied out like a war zone after shelling, and homes turned into bunkers. People washed their groceries with bleach and wore protective masks and latex gloves. Airports went dark, trains sat still, whole cities froze in place. A trip to the store felt like stepping into enemy territory aisles, arriving anxiously to grasp the final remaining toilet paper or kleenex for the foreseeable future. Strangers eyed each other like threats, in fear that they were in dangerously close proximity, jeopardizing their lives.

    People kept calling it temporary. “We’ll get back to normal,” they said, with a half-smile inspiring no confidence, obviously trying to convince themselves. However, grief doesn’t have an expiration date. It doesn’t pack up and leave just because the doors reopened. It settles in silently and hangs in the air during a loading screen at 2 AM when the only thing that makes sense is a pixelated world where there are no viruses, no news alerts, and no empty chairs. There is only noise and light and a few more borrowed minutes of forgetting and joking around with your friends.

    The country was not only physically sick, but its fabric was beginning to completely tear apart. Tragic racially motivated incidents led to protests challenging injustice which filled the streets. Sirens began to howl and cities emerged from the quiet and darkness, now suddenly taken over by fire and fury. What began as cries for change turned into division that seeped into families, friendships, and created heated exchanges between strangers on social media. People picked sides like it was war. Then came the election, dragging even more chaos behind it—flags turned to weapons, truth twisted until no one could see straight. The air felt charged and ready to break. It felt like a country was unraveling. Dystopia wasn’t a theoretical or abstract warning from George Orwell anymore—it was just outside our doorsteps.

    Eventually, the country, and the world as a whole recovered; it did not end, but it didn’t come back the same. Something in it broke, quietly, and never got put back together. People smiled again, went outside, went to movie theaters, sports games, and concerts experiencing joy they missed—but there has been a fundamental, observable shift. A kind of disillusionment, like we had all woken up from a bad dream only to realize we were still inside it. Nothing felt real or safe. The world kept turning, but those who lived through this struggled to turn with it.

In this piece, I adapted Michael Herr’s Dispatches style, emphasizing realism by illustrating the pandemic’s true devastating effects without downplaying. This mirrors what Herr does in describing the Vietnam war. I also utilized some of Herr’s literary techniques incorporating vivid, specific imagery to capture the psychological weight of events and the daily struggle it caused for those who lived through it. I utilized similar literary techniques such as em dashes to convey fragmentation and disorientation, as well as anaphoras and repeated sentence structures to convey urgency and bluntly illustrate its destruction. Also like Herr, I tried to blend narrative highlighting specifics of my own experience during the pandemic, as well as journalism documenting historical events within this time.