I wonder what will come out of all of this chaos? Chaos meaning COVID. COVID meaning being eternally stuck at home with nowhere to go. It’s weird to think about what this will be like in a few months.
Will this all be over? Will life ever go back to normal? It feels like an eternity since I was at school. Will I have a summer? Will I get to celebrate my birthday in June?
I remember how it all came so quickly. One day we were having a normal school day and the next day we are told no more school. It's all so weird that just a few weeks prior there was no plan at all, we all were just living normally. Now we are imprisoned inside all day and nothing sounds fun.
Every morning I rub my eyes till they are cracked open. I have been going to bed late. Not as late as others, but pretty late. I force myself out of bed, drag myself up for a short workout, then I eat till my stomach feels densely full. Then slouch over on my chair to glare into my computer screen for hours for an online school. Zoom classes come first. I sit through the awkwardness of can’t telling if anyone is staring at me for an hour and a half. My time is often eaten up by work or stress about work. We really don’t have that much work. I feel as though my emotions are muted and I can only vividly make out what they are trying to tell me which makes me more overwhelmed and confused making it hard to work. To put it visually, my brain is my body’s computer. For every tab I have open is another stress. I can only trash it when I am done, but trashing it only dismisses it temporarily. It usually comes back in the form of a pop-up. When the time comes (freedom) I am stuck. What to do now?
________________ I don’t know.______ Now I’m bored. ________Again.____________ Like everyday.
I ponder about one day far in the future where I tell my kids (if I have kids) about all of this. If this was the future the beaches become a graveyard of trash and abandoned treasures. The stores go bankrupt and lose their money. The homeless become sick and their numbers grow. Depression and chronic loneliness grow. Crime goes down a bit but not the crime of innocent people and families dying. It’s weird. The feeling of uncertainty. I never felt a feeling this strong. I need to know what will happen, but I can’t. The door to my home locks me into a safe place and I feel that outside of there has become a world of instability, exposure, and peril. Behind our masks, we become by-products of the demons of fear. We are wasted away by the news that makes us weak and feels more and more powerless until we are nothing but lost hope. We need more news to lift us up, but the problem is: is there any?
This meaning wiping down food from the stores, constantly doing chores to keep things clean, wearing masks, virtual friends, and COVID-19 altogether. The world is different now. We planned on going to Big Bear a few weeks ago, but now the only mountain I can see is a mountain of homework piling up behind my back. Dust collects on everything even the skills and math I used to know but now seem to struggle with. My senses have been put on hold until anything fun picks up the phone. My friends get cut off by poor connections with wifi and our real connections which now feel like they’re fading away. I see there faces but I don’t SEE there faces. I miss them. I’ve changed. We’ve changed.
But that’s okay.
Life is constantly changing and it's our job to change with it even if it’s hard. This is a milestone, not a wall we can move around. The world has changed and even though there is nothing we can do about it, I know you and I both wish this all would just end everything would go back to the way it was before. Everyone feels this way.
My life before this seems like a fabricated reality. My memories have become wishes and my photos have become dreams. On weekends it’s so hard not to want to hang out with my friends in person. I don’t even know the last time I hugged them was. Even on that last day of school none of us were expecting this to come. To be completely honest we were all a bit excited to not have school, we all thought we were just getting another week of break and then we'd all come back. I wish I could hold on to that last moment with them forever, but it feels like butter that is slipping from my hands. Now, we are all bored out of our minds wishing for something to do with our lives.
Wishing, dreaming, and waiting
for something
normal,
Unless this is the
new normal…