The day the curfew was announced it made her realize how alone she was. Her heart pounded and she needed to go outside. She needed air, she needed to be outdoors. So she put on her mask and made her way to the lobby of her building, looked around to make sure no one was watching, and then opened the door and rushed out into the night. She walked keeping her head down averting her eyes. She walked a few blocks heading downtown when the ambulance sirens reached her. She had heard them for weeks but now they were more real, more relevant. And that was when he came into her mind. He was in an ambulance the very last time she saw him. She had reached his apartment too late. His best friend called to tell her that he was dying and he had asked for her. She had taken a cab downtown and got there just when the ambulance door closed and she could see him. His eyes were closed, and his mouth was open. Then the ambulance pulled away into the dark, wintery mist. She walked and walked, one street after another. She shut off her phone and felt liberated. She was alone in a city under a curfew and she was breaking the curfew and she felt free, free to allow the city to bring its memories to her. That street corner at that bar, now closed up and dark, was a place where she had once been doing something with some people. That hotel was where she had gotten all dressed up and attended a party. That apartment building was where she once lived for a few months decades ago. That park was where she had been with a lover and that was when Walter became real to her as if he was sitting on a bench waiting for her as he had done so many years ago. Most of the places that she walked passed held memories of when she had spent time with him. She had met Walter when she moved to New York City from the Midwest and he was everything she imagined the city to be. He was a decade and a half older. He was angry and tired. He was bitter and lonely. He always looked like a bear lost in the woods. He always wore an old jacket and dark slacks. His beard always needed trimming. His shoes always needed repair and his thick dark hair always needed combing. His large, piercing dark eyes needed comfort and his mournfulness needed patience. His wife left him and moved back to South America leaving him penniless. He had won a playwrighting award when he was much younger but no one cared about his work anymore so he worked for a temp agency and that was where she met him. She was also working part-time. She saw an imaginary Walter sitting on the bench and she sat beside him. She looked up at his imaginary, large, sad face listening to him telling her how she should leave the city, telling her that life was cruel and that she too would suffer like him because she, too believed in something way too much. Like he once did. When she argued with him that she refused to be defeated and that she refused to suffer he told her that it was her youth that was making her arrogant and that no matter what she did, she was going to suffer and cry out in distress because she, like him, would only experience disappointment and heartache. As she thought all this, the darkness slowly turned the city into one enormous shadow. The tall buildings stood silent in the stillness. Only the occasional scream of the ambulance siren shattered it. When Walter kissed her his kisses were more like tears. When he tried to speak to her with tenderness his words could only sound harsh and accusing. She realized his concern for her was too much for him. His feelings for her were too demanding and his drinking helped him swallow his hurt and resentment. She left the park, walked down to the Village, found his old apartment, stood outside it in the crisscross amber lamppost light and looked up to the top floor which was once his window. She stood there like she once did a long time ago barely twenty-one, barely able to comprehend what he meant to her waiting for him to come home, seeing him drunkenly hobble down the tree-lined street towards his front door. And when seeing her waiting to surprise him, he would shout for her to go away and leave him to suffer alone. He would shout at her that he didn’t need her pity even though it wasn’t pity she felt for him. It was awe. She was in awe of someone who tried to reach for something unattainable and then failed. Failing made him majestic to her young, impressionable, anxious being. She was taken in by his tragic nature since she had come to the same city he had years before struggling to become something she could never be anywhere else. He failed in that quest but she was determined not to. She walked back to Uptown. As she did she became once again aware of the ambulance sirens screeching through the otherworldly deserted streets. She felt the city weight on her shoulders and in her memory she watched the ambulance take Walter away to die. His soul had died years earlier it just took longer for his body to die as well. When she got home to her apartment and put on the light, she realized she had been searching. She had been searching for something in the darkened city made even more bare, not only by the virus but now by the curfew. She was looking for signposts and markings to assure her that she had been there. She was searching for a testament that she had friends, that she had lovers. She demanded that she be as real as the weeping sirens.