It’s finally time to reunite with friends. So why do I feel so lonely?

After over a year of isolation during Covid, my hunger to reunite with friends grew more and more desperate. Last spring, when New York City became the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic and I volunteered as an emergency medical technician, I often telegraphed to a better future that involved traveling to a warm-weathered island with my girlfriends, telling stories deep into the night, laughing for days. One day a passage returned to me from a Jim Shepard story called "Boys Town," about a struggling war veteran, which goes When the possibility of taking a trip to Martha's Vineyard with four of my closest friends arrived along with the vaccines, I seized the opportunity. I wept over all the events we'd missed in each other's lives over the past year — the birthdays and brunches, funerals and holidays — the time we lost and would never get back. But as an EMT I can't help but feel insulted that New York City has chosen to honor its front-line workers with a parade rather than by paying EMTs and paramedics a fair wage for the grueling and critical rescue work they've been doing thanklessly for years, with 2020 offering a master class in ambulance-driven heroism.