Echoes of a Silent City
written by: Dawn Minott
The city that never sleeps… finally closed its eyes.
I remember waking up and thinking something was wrong with my ears. The usual 6 a.m. hum of delivery trucks below my Bronx apartment — gone. No car horns, no screeching subway brakes, no corner store/bodega banter in Spanglish. Just… stillness.
It was the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown in New York City. And silence had swallowed the city whole.
I stepped outside, masked and half afraid.
Broadway was bare. Fifth Avenue could’ve been a runway. Even Times Square — a place where sound seems to ricochet off neon lights — was mute. No cars moved through the grid. No tourists. No yellow taxis. No street preachers shouting “REPENT!” through crackling speakers. Just pigeons (a lot of them), pacing like they too were wondering where the people had gone.
For a moment, I stood at the center of it all — just me, alone, arms outstretched — and heard nothing. No laughter. No footsteps. No wind.
It was haunting. Eerie even.
But, in retrospect, I realize the city hadn’t lost its voice. It had just changed mediums.
I recall as I walked along 42nd Street away from Times Square, I saw that boarded-up windows had become canvases. Protest art bloomed in technicolor. Bold murals. Fists raised high. Names written in looping script — Breonna. Ahmaud. George. Reminders that while the city stood still, grief and rage roamed freely. They seeped into plywood and spray paint. They bled onto concrete.
That summer, the silence gave space for another kind of sound: the echo of resistance. You could feel it in your chest, even without the beat of a drum.
In the quiet, I noticed things I’d never heard before while out and about in NYC: I could hear the exhales of my own breath. The crunch of debris beneath my soles. New York had become a sanctuary of stillness — but not peace. Because while the virus took our sound, injustice kept screaming.
And even in silence, the city whispered.
Each empty corner, each unoccupied bench, felt like a page waiting to be rewritten, to answer the unasked question of what might be next.
NOTE:
Based on the Prompt – Echoes of a Silent City
- The Taste of Memory - September 23, 2025
- Echoes of a Silent City - August 23, 2025
- Life Lessons - July 23, 2025
