For a few strange years, we all became half-visible. Eyes floating above cloth. Voices muffled. Smiles reduced to polite guesses. It’s wild how quickly it became normal.

When everything starts to break, people usually turn to the loud ones. The experts. The politicians. The optimists with charts and slogans.

There’s a strange thing that happens when everything starts falling apart, people start laughing. Not everyone, not all the time, but enough that it becomes its own quiet rebellion. Humor slips through the cracks like sunlight through boarded windows. And that’s not denial. That’s survival.

When the world shut down, so did the noise. No commutes. No small talk. No pretending we were fine when we weren’t. The usual rhythm of human life that was fast, loud and endless, suddenly went still. For a moment, we all got a glimpse of what silence actually sounds like. And in that stillness, poetry started breathing again.