THE WHOLE LOAF

On my third day of solo travel, I realized I had been subconsciously ceding the right of way to pigeons as they pecked by in their search for crumbs.

I’m a traveler by nature, and a relatively brave one at that—I’d lived abroad for a year after college, ridden in tuk-tuks through massive cities halfway across the world, and traveled solo for much of my twenties. But over the course of the previous two years, along with everyone else, I’d watched helplessly as the pandemic shrunk my world until it was made up of just me, my husband, and our dog, hiding in our basement and binge-watching really dumb TV. Those early days of quarantine and fear and sadness were awful enough, but as time wore on, things just became harder as the virus took more and more away from us all.