Day 240 of Isolation

To state that a lot has happened since my last post would be greatly understating the matter. In the past month, we've dealt with another wave of Covid, the struggle bus of mid-first-semester, the oddest Halloween of our lives, and the results of an election we'll remember forever. The last few days have been tinged with some hope, from the election of a president who isn't bros with white supremacists to the announcement of a 90% effective vaccine that could be distributed by next summer. Life feels like a waiting game right now, but as the nights grow darker, we can find comfort in remembering that the people we care about are still out there, even if we can't be physically together, and that even with all we've lost, we can still find small pieces of happiness.

As I adjust to taking fully-online classes at home, I'm empathizing more with my public-school or fully-remote friends who've dealt with solitary confinement to blue-lit rooms for two months already. There are days when all I do is stare at my computer and work on the assignments that have been piling up on me like falling autumn leaves covering a cadaver in the woods. It's not that the workload is too much (most of the time), it's that without many day-to-day sources of happiness in my house, I'm beginning to feel like all I do is work. Even now, this post has been pushed back partially because of schoolwork that was due instead, deadlines always lurking behind me.

With the third spike of cases, this pandemic is definitely going to be at least a yearlong event. Colder autumn weather is bringing people closer together in ways that are pretty unsafe, so spring semester is no longer a beacon of hope. Sometimes it feels like we're all running into the sunset, striving towards a glowing horizon which we never actually reach, faces illuminated by a faraway star we'll never truly feel the warmth of. I know that's objectively not true - this isn't going to last forever, and we need to just remember that. Especially because of this new spike, though, the second semester is going to be the same as the first for me, with my grade split up once again, but this time into different groups. The news was rough for me, a being made of desire for human connection, but at least I don't have it as bad as my friends who are in touchless relationships during this pandemic. Plus, I'll get to meet new people, so for now, I'm counting down the days until I can just go back to school.

A week ago, it was Halloween, but if this year's iteration of the holiday was a song, it wouldn't be the campy funk of Michael Jackson's “Thriller” but the pared-down strings of Phoebe Bridgers' “Halloween”. Fitting, since sitting at home in my cute costume I put on only for pictures, seeing all the photos of people who are on-campus right now, frolicking in costumes with their new friends through the hallways I used to admire, made me feel like quite the ghost. To put it simply, the FOMO is hitting, especially because there are genuinely so many people with whom I want to be friends, but the health necessity of splitting my class up is making friend groups pretty weird, and I'm watching friend groups form in real time that, logistically, I can't be a part of. It's odd to see a whole different set of people on campus adjusting to the pandemic regulations, just as my cohort did, and there's already been some Facebook drama about whether or not their group is worse than mine at social distancing. Luckily, though, there have still been no positive cases at my school, and it's great that we get to go back in-person at all.

Directly following Halloween was the most deeply unsettling time, though: Election Day, which turned into Election Week this year. Looking back, this was days ago, but I can't remember a single topic I learned in class that week in the blur of bitten fingernails, refreshing CNN's live results, and dark jokes about an impending civil war. On Tuesday night, we saw the red mirage of contested states trending Republican before mail-in ballots were counted, leading my family to beg me to go to sleep as I craned my neck towards my phone in the dark, crying over a map that was far too red for my comfort. As state after state flipped, my family and friends and I became more and more excited. Some of my friends and I had phone banked together in my state, and while the state ultimately disappointed us, it was luckily an outlier: the election was called on Saturday, signaling a future of an America I might actually want to live in.

I'll write about that night, since no matter where you were, everyone's going to remember it forever. Masked crowds filled the sidewalks of my city's downtown, cheering and crying. I was home with my family trying to push away thoughts of the night's lost potential when we decided to drive to where the people were and join the celebration. A symphony of honking cars and whooping greeted us as we embraced the cacophony, waving to every smiling person we passed on the street. My mother piloted our minivan, playing happy music I'd forgotten about, grinning more than I could remember her doing in the past few stressful months, calling out to every person we saw, "Yeah! We did it!" No doubt, the victory had a quieter aftermath for my more rural friends, but after how closely my class-wide group chat had been following the election and direly fearing its outcome, we all slept better that night, knowing that our next president wouldn't be trying to destroy the environment, forbid gay marriage, or ignore the pandemic.

So, where does this leave us, approaching the nine-month mark of pandemic? Well, there's no way of knowing if this vaccine signals the beginning of the end, or if it's just going to be another dangling plot thread that the grand epic of 2020 never quite picks up. I'm hopeful, but realistically, life might be like this for a while. For me, that's solidly okay, and for now, that'll have to be enough.

XOXO, Quaranteen