Day 391 of Isolation

It’s been a while since my last post, and I apologize. My past few weekends, the last I’d spend at school, have been especially precious, and I haven’t wanted to funnel my time from experiencing into documenting until now, when the pile of recent events I’d like to discuss threatens to topple with every passing day. This post might be scattered, with various colors of emotion leaking through in each sentence, blending into paragraphs tie-dyed by loss and excitement, but I hope my peculiar collage of moods is an accurate representation of the new milestone we’ve reached - one year of pandemic. The passage of a year has made me sense the pandemic’s expiration date hanging in the air, amidst the birdsong and clouds of pollen. It’s all reminding me of the beginning of this, when the time off school was still novel and fun, but the fact that all the markers of March and April are happening again and we’re still quarantined makes me feel trapped in a time loop in every second that I sit in my house. Collective will to obey Covid regulations, especially in situations where everyone is continually tested for the virus, is also waning - when I was on campus, I’d fall into moods where every instinct of mine was to reach out and hug even those of my friends for whom I have mixed feelings, and some of my friends and acquaintances are once again practicing dubious Covid safety. It won’t be long before we can bring those now-forbidden instincts out of hiding within ourselves, but for now, I’ll fluctuate between listening to my upbeat 2000s party music with a newfound hope for the future and girlbossing my way through the workload of the second semester of junior year. On the day we moved off campus, my brain couldn’t stop making a list of goodbyes, of the people who I’ll probably never see again. I’d never seen so many people my age crying before our last day - reminiscent of last year’s surprise move-out, but this time, there was a grave finality in the goodbyes. It can be hard to make this pandemic feel like anything but a cosmic wrongdoing, a year of youth sucked away that I’ll spend my next ten attempting to make up for in pulsating crowds or in strangers’ arms. We can’t brush our loss aside, but we can rebuild and find value in the suffering because there is no alternative. Ultimately, today’s high schoolers will still have time to make the wonderful mistakes of adolescence, both in pockets of joy during this pandemic and in the inevitable after. Most of the reason I’m always so broken up about leaving campus is because, with this pandemic, the unrepeatable adolescent opportunity of maintaining close friendships in-person has been chopped into slivers, making any memories especially precious. Missing the most cliched teenage milestones (looking at you, school dances and concerts and night drives and uncomplicatedly Instagrammable boyfriends), we find our own narrative beats. Even if most of my experiences aren’t movie scenes, they’re all honest, and I’m alright. Looking back through my old posts, I remember how terrified I was of forgetting any tidbit of my time at school and my relationships with friends, so petrified that I was constantly arranging human moments into instant picture frames, categorizing and labeling my memories while they were happening, feeling the loss of every passing moment with an embarrassing amount of distress. Even with the amount of photos I have, though, I’ve realized that my fears have come true. When picturing friends I haven’t seen since the fall, I no longer remember the specifics of how they walk or gesture, and the details in my mental images of what it was like to be with them are blurring (I’ll abstain from death metaphors, my all-too-common vice). Oddly enough, though, I’ve finally come to be okay with that - the details aren’t important, really, not compared to the way it felt to laugh with them or the lessons we’ve learned from each other. It sounds corny, but even being apart from my friends, I can’t separate myself from the slang phrases, new favorite songs, and imprints on my worldview that I now carry with me. Even if we never meet again, one can’t ever say goodbye to one hundred percent of a person, and all we can do now is appreciate the time we have and be grateful that, once, we knew each other. In between move-ins and move-outs, high-school students have luckily been given the buffer of spring break to readjust and prepare for the last half of the semester (I use “luckily” because many college students have been simply denied a break this year). At my school, there’s also the reason I have time to write this at all - an academic relief week to give us a chance to catch up on late work. While incredibly helpful, the fact that this concession happened at all potentially points to the direness of the problem that preceded it - student mental health during the past few months, especially for those at home, had been extremely endangered by the constant rush of Zoom classes and deadlines and harsh late penalties, to the extent that posts about students wanting to hurt themselves had flooded our anonymous Facebook page. Although most cases are less extreme, it’s incredibly demoralizing for those of us who used to be confident in our intelligence but are now realizing that every online lesson takes longer to understand. I remember struggling to understand a particular chemistry concept, but it clicked as soon as I was able to talk it through with a teacher in-person, reassuring me that maybe I was still smart, actually. No one who struggles with online learning is stupid; the process is just objectively harder (especially difficult mathematical and scientific topics, I think). Especially in what’s supposedly the most important academic semester of high school, which most of us are completing majority-online, I’m grateful for the extra time. As I’m writing this, two more milestones in the spring-stress timeline have just passed - the admittance of the next class of juniors into my school, and the last notifications of college decisions for current seniors. For many of us juniors, it’s a succession of reminders of a future for which we don’t feel ready - I’ve barely even had a junior year, and now I’m supposed to be a senior applying to college? I can’t help but feel a slight jealousy towards the incoming class, one whose experience at my school (hopefully) won’t be cut short at all. As for the current seniors, college acceptance rates this year dropped to startlingly low levels, and as I slowly watched my talented and amazing friends get rejection after rejection, I’ve been reminded how much of this process is out of my control. In the next five-ish months, I’ll try my best to pour my soul into an application portfolio that could be tossed aside in minutes by an admissions officer in a foul mood from a delayed subway ride or mediocre breakfast bagel. My relationship with the platitude about accepting that which we cannot control is usually antagonistic, but in this scenario, I’m trying to revel in the randomness of it all. Regardless of where you are on the spectrum of “college-subreddit-rabbithole” to “oh-god-where-am-i-even-applying”, adulthood is approaching, and although it’s hard not to feel like a helium balloon soon to be set free only to end up deflated in a ditch or strangling a sea creature, I’m trying to lean into the excitement of going to any college at all - prestige is fake, and no matter where I end up, I’ll find a way to work hard and be content. The future is wildly exciting in so many ways, and college is already looking up - many private schools are already mandating vaccination for on-campus students next year, indicating a promising return to normalcy amid rising vaccine availability. Trying to get vaccinated right now is like TV show scenes in which drugs are procured - supplies are limited, there’s a decent amount of side-door fraud occurring, you have to know the right people, sometimes you get lucky and someone starts giving it away, you drive to the middle of nowhere for just a chance at a jab, and you tell a select group of friends about a promising plug. (In the weeks after I wrote this section, supplies increased, but the excitement still applies.) Writing shortly after hearing about a vaccine hookup, I was too ecstatic to fall asleep, excited about getting a shot for the first time in my life. In my state, all adults 16+ are eligible for vaccination, and about half of my friends have already gotten their first doses or have appointments to do so. Very recently, it was also announced that Pfizer is safe and effective for 12-15-year-olds, so even middle-schoolers will be vaccinated. It’s easy to forget that, as you make it through day after unfulfilling day, that this pandemic will concretely be over soon, but rest assured that it will. About a month from now, ¾ of my family will be fully immunized, and I could even hypothetically hang out closely with vaccinated friends! Every day, another few people I know get vaccinated, proudly posting their cards on social media, grin obvious even behind a mask. In the face of vaccine reluctance from certain sectors of the population, my friends and I joke about proudly getting microchipped. As long as we keep following required regulations, the end of this pandemic could sneak up on us like the best kind of surprise. As we hopefully approach a transitory summer and once-again normal next year, this pandemic has taught us how to handle our disappointments - we’ve gotten through crushed hope after crushed hope, and we’re still here. A year ago, I was lamenting that I simply would NOT be able to stand it if the summer was cancelled, and here I am now, begrudgingly standing the aforementioned “it” and so much more. Yes, a lot of us have missed some nominal chances to mature, but we’re also being forced to grow into our futures with the knowledge that no pain will ruin us as completely as we’d feared. We can’t ignore or sugarcoat how awful life can get during this pandemic. All we can do is try to leave ourselves with the hope that we’ll view our pasts with gratitude, our presents with resilience, and our futures with excitement. It’s finally spring, and soon the world will be new again. All we can do is appreciate it. XOXO, Quaranteen