Day 204 of Isolation

It's October, the formerly-titled "spooky season" in a year where campy movies about murderous ghosts, plucky teenagers, and comically bad decisions would be a welcome escape from the chaos and uncertainty that can often cloud news headlines and our futures. Indeed, escapism seems to be the current theme for high schoolers, whether we're playing hours of mobile games in which we can be cartoon spacemen rather than human people, watching Tiktoks with specific instructions on how to shift realities into Hogwarts, or throwing ourselves into personal projects. Although most Americans are suffering from pandemic fatigue after almost seven months, life in most states is slowly returning to normal, albeit socially-distant, with the pretty large exception of most schools and workplaces. Since no one knows when a vaccine will be widely produced and distributed, with estimates ranging from "before the end of 2020" to "June 2021", any plans one makes for the near future have to be pretty flexible. We're fully committing to the fall aesthetic this year, filling our homes with pumpkin, apple, cinnamon, and caramel flavors and scents in an attempt to regain the emotional sense of coziness and warmth that quarantine has made more complicated.

As you can probably tell from the title of this post, many of my classmates and I are back at home with our families. My school's first residential group lasted the entirety of our six-week stay on-campus without any outbreaks, and two days ago, we all moved out, transporting the entirety of our lives back into the houses we'd come from that no longer feel like proper homes. Along with our bedding and school books and trinkets from excursions with friends, we packed away the new personalities we'd acquired. The slang phrases lifted from friends' vocabularies, the communal school-specific lexicon, the newfound confidence or sociability or emotional depth, will now recede inside of us for most of our waking hours, going wherever we put the parts of ourselves that are, for the moment, simply wrong for our surroundings, at least until a welcome phone call or Zoom session with a friend lets us slip back into those versions of ourselves where many of us were the happiest. Everyone wished we could stay on-campus, even joking that we should secretly live in the school's vents like real-life Among Us characters to distract ourselves from crying.

It's odd being a student at a school that's been sectioned off into cohorts right now because, while half of us are confronting the end of six weeks of relative happiness and freedom, the other half are preparing to move in with the buzzing anticipation that I remember feeling two months ago. As a member of the former group, I sometimes feel like we're dying and being replaced by those in the latter group, but when I get sad about that, I remember that I can always live vicariously through my friends who'll be moving in soon when classes restart after fall break. Anyway, there's always Zoom. And, since the word at my school is that, barring the distribution of a vaccine before February, we'll be split up again for the spring semester, I'll be getting most of my happiness from the recent past and the far future. If nothing else, my generation is going to get a LOT of practice with long-distance friendships and relationships, and at least we're getting creative and fighting to keep the friends we have, however we can.

With less than a month remaining until the American presidential election, headlines are going wild with two major events that occurred within less than a week of each other: first, the presidential debate (in which one of the candidates had to ask the other to "please shut up") and second, the incumbent president, who's downplayed and completely mismanaged national response to this pandemic, testing positive for COVID-19 in a moment of poetic justice that rivals a Greek tragedy. Watching the debate with two close friends, I laughed at the spectacle of two grown men failing to have a civil discussion while simultaneously being filled with the gnawing dread of what electoral politics has come to. And the experimental drugs I remember studying in my online class are now being used to treat the commander-in-chief's symptomatic instance of the virus. It's pretty cool how the science has been accelerated, but I just hope the vaccines actually work, and hopefully as soon as possible.

Anyway, the ridiculousness of recent headlines isn't helping my tendency to see literary significance in real-life events and frame my life as a movie. The five months I spent isolated before returning to school, getting little social interaction but watching a LOT of movies and television, have led me to see cinematic parallels, foreshadowing, and character growth in real life. Some of my friends joke that I'm the main character of our school, maybe because of how excited I was to tell my personal romantic business to anyone who would listen at the start of the year, or because I'm shamefully dedicated to aesthetics and doing things for the vibe. Though I do enjoy the attention as much as any extrovert who's been starved for human connection, the jokes make me a little uncomfortable because they separate me from the normal people and remind me that I've perhaps been a bit too much sometimes, personality-wise. Even writing this blog is a form of fictionalizing my own life - when I started writing, I didn't care about who was reading or how I presented myself, but now, I feel pressure to be a better person so I can be a likable character, and having to perform mental acrobatics to frame current events positively in writing has also helped me keep the sadness at bay most of the time.

Being part of successful case study in preventing outbreaks in schools has given me hope for the next few months. After living at school, I've become used to wearing a mask everywhere but my room, and even walking to the shower inside my house without a mask on made me do a double-take yesterday. Plus, I've gotten used to the stinging feeling of a cotton swab reaching up my nose after already being tested three times. I don't doubt that, like my group, the next set of students to live on-campus will have an adjustment period and maybe a few scares, but I trust that almost everyone will follow the guidelines and we'll be successful. Looking at safety from the school's perspective, I get why they want to follow the same half-density plan again in the spring semester, but for the emotional purposes of my friends and I, I'm really hoping that not all of my junior year is going to be messed up, since I've finally met some of the people I've been looking for my whole life.

I'd been worried about maintaining my friendships, but in the first couple days, I've actually been talking to my friends almost constantly, in a volume consistent with when we were in-person. For the first time in my life, it feels like I'm not the only one fighting to preserve my friendships, hopefully showing that the people I'm so grateful to have found were actually happy to find me too. I've been pretty scared lately that my friends and I were going to forget each other, but writing so often has helped me keep a record of who I was during quarantine, and who my friends were during quarantine. I not only take hundreds of photos but write down detailed accounts of my feelings and the people in my life, trying to condense their essences at a given moment into words I hoard for myself. It's hard to find the balance between living in the present and allowing time to pass me versus holding onto what makes me happy and preserving my memories, but if this pandemic has taught me anything, it's flexibility.

Endings are difficult in more ways than one, but I'm trying to believe that everything in life is a lesson. Maybe being forced to be apart from my friends is teaching me that the small beautiful moments in life, the guffaws of friends and golden October mornings and words of affirmation, are what I need to enjoy in the present and use a reason to hope for the future.

XOXO, Quaranteen