by Hamdiya Ahmed ’24

Thirty minutes a day sounded like this.

A fifteen minute one-way walk to the bus stop everyday defined my 2021 summer.

Working at Target is a college student’s dream – a relatively great pay ratio to hours worked; working with other teenagers; a great discount at such a cute, chic, trendy department store.

But it was brutal. Hours worked in the summer were long and suffered through rolling, all-encompassing humid heat waves punctured by flash-flooding thunderstorms. Pissy elderly women dedicated to home decorating projects gone wrong.

But I did get fifteen minutes of reprieve twice a day, walking through the familiar neighborhood full of strangers, where my body both built its mental armor and discarded of it. The metal shield plates formed with every light brush of the low-hanging tree branches, the iron chains unbuckling with every pass of the wind.

The summer represented hope and fertility. It was the dusk of my gap year, and the dawn of my return to Smith.  The summer sounded like joy. Cars shot past, the sound of my footfalls only audible in the brief moments of silence. People were free.

I’m nostalgic for that brief moment in time, where hope felt within grasp and the world nearly oriented itself on its axis. But just as I approached the bus stop, so did the world fall short of post-COVID dreams. And boarding the bus, hit with the reality of masking, did my armor solidify. And so did the heavy machinery of sound.