Day 458 of Isolation

Hi again. I feel like I blinked in the spring, and now it’s the middle of July and months have passed since my last post. Pollen-soaked streets have given way to evening rainstorms and morning dampness that bookend summer jobs, and we’re finally going outside again. I’d made a promise to myself to get this post out before my birthday - the second one I’ll write about here - but that promise was broken, and I’ll now settle for finishing now, on a writing bender, as my windows are pounded by the wrath of a July hurricane oddly named for a Disney princess. Here, though, at long last, I’ve made you some content! Please pretend this post was released on June 14th, and I’ll update you soon with what’s happened since then. About halfway through the summer, I’m realizing that life has gradually, finally, mostly gone back to normal, and I’m left with nothing but the impending everything - senior year, leaving home, legal and societal adulthood - on which to reflect.

At my school, the second cohort of friends moved in, then moved out. Like the end of the first semester, the end of the second snuck up on us, with me suddenly realizing that school was nearly over when I returned home. Those last few weeks were an odd mix of eagerly awaiting the last few days and dreading what they represented - a final deadline for papers, projects, exams, and late work, one’s last possible chance to salvage semester grades. I’m never sure to what extent the anguish I’m put through because of school is my own poor time management and study habits or the actual difficulty of the material and learning on Zoom, but finals week was… a lot for me. The night before the deadline for all late work, what felt like half of the school pulled a collective all-nighter to finish it, and I saw the aftermath, the cans of Monster and impromptu collapses from exhaustion, on my friends’ socials the next morning. I hadn’t stayed up - I could count myself lucky in the regard that turning in work past its due date, prolonging the period in which it encroaches upon my personal space like an expanding darkness, makes my breathing go shaky just to think about it, so I physically cannot do late work. The succession of finals I had, though, meant that I spent a few consecutive days shut in my room, racing against the clock to squeeze the last few coherent sentences out of my brain like water from a sponge.

Additionally, AP exams have come and gone, and for me, they’ll hopefully be the last remnant of pandemic awfulness pervading academics. Although summer is typically a time in which one becomes distanced from the memories of sobbing over math problems, this has once again been an atypical year in that my school placed our fully-online exams in early June, a few weeks after graduation. Removing myself in time from those exams, which almost convinced me to give up on math for the rest of my life, the feelings I’ve written here are melodramatic and alien to me. In hopeful likelihood, I’ll never again spend hours a day on my computer, Zooming and studying and socializing alike, and it might be a while before I feel that all-consuming panic again. I’m glad to have this odd record of my former state of mind, though, and I’ll include my dark metaphors as a reminder of how things have actually gotten better.

Past the academic struggles, I’m feeling happy, because real life is coming back! For me, it started with one of my best friends’ surprise birthday picnics. Arranging the cakes, sandwiches, fruit, and (non-alcoholic) champagne bottles on a blanket before us, I sat close to friends, and, knowing that almost all of us were vaccinated, we ate in each other’s company, close without feeling guilty or scared. I remember hugging everyone there - the tightest, longest hugs I’d ever had. At my old school, there had been friends with whom I’d sat at lunch for a year and a half and never touched. Now, thanks to the vaccine, it’s possible for me to hug even those of my friends who were the most strict about pandemic safety, after waiting almost a year to do so.

Another friend’s birthday and another picnic was when I realized that, in a small context, we didn’t have to worry about Covid anymore - we shared cars and hugs and homemade rainbow cake like it was 2019. Walking around in my city where most everyone is vaccinated, the pandemic is mostly absent from my mind, and though I carry a mask whenever I go out, I don’t often need it, as most stores allow vaccinated people to go maskless. Unmasked smiles are slowly reappearing in my photos, and I’m proud to report that I now spend less than three hours per week on Zoom. I’ve rolled my eyes at proponents of “unplugging”, as the word often carries with it connotations of hiking and self-important social media announcements that one will be leaving said social media, but getting off of my screens and out of my house have been amazing. Shut in our homes with nothing but the mirrors of our devices, one could have either felt completely alone or paradoxically watched, but getting outside and talking to people in real life again has felt amazing. It’s the way we’re meant to interact, and the way we’ll hopefully interact for the rest of our lives.

With the end of our school year, too, comes the end of cohort-based divisions throughout schools, like my own, that were semi-online last year. Under state orders, public schools will be returning in-person, so I no longer mentally simulate what it would be like to have only a subset of my friends with me at school - as of now, the full population (twice the amount that I’m used to) will be living at school at the same time. I’ll meet a whole new group of juniors, and although I do worry about isolation’s impacts on a class that didn’t even finish their freshman year of high school, I’m excited to see what they’re like. I, too, feel sometimes like I’m going straight from being a tenth grader to suddenly being a senior - when I move back to school in a month, half of the traditions will be completely new to me. We’ll be seniors in name, but seniors with no idea of what “normal” looks like at our school. I’m trying to spin this as a positive - we get to reinvent the culture of our school, which is objectively pretty cool. I just hope that we do it properly next year, with more people leaving their rooms and hanging out in-person, and that the reformation of tradition is uniquely ours.

For me, June’s return means that I’m getting a summer that much more closely aligns with my hopes for next year. I’ve started my first paid job, and I spend most of my time at the pool working as either a lifeguard or a coach. My summer swim team season, which was totally cancelled next year, was surprise-approved at the beginning of June, and I now spend as much time as I can corralling kids from ages 6 to 17 into the water. Swim season has always been my favorite monthlong period of the year, and getting to see the people I’d gone two years without has made me feel like myself again. Similarly, many of my friends have also started work or returned to work - no longer do all of my friends have blank days ripe for calling and hanging out, and I’m now having to strictly schedule myself, as the calendar page on my bullet journal is filling quite quickly. I’m glad to see that many of us are still acquiring job skills now (even if the jobs are awful), and aren’t irreversibly stunted by the pandemic.

I’d say I’m getting my life back, but the truth is that I barely had any of this before the pandemic. I used to waste my summer evenings downtown angry that I was only ever with my family. Now, I’m glad to have the time with them that I do and to also do the fun activities I’d always imagined with my friends. I used to be utterly touch-starved - my best dreams would always consist of hugging people who I was scared to talk to in real life. Now, all of my friends say I’m one of the best huggers they know. Most of my good experiences now are new, and the least bad thing about this pandemic, perhaps, is that they feel much sweeter. Coming out on the tail end of semi-isolation, most of my friends are also happier, more settled, more thoroughly themselves. After all, one’s sixteenth year of life is bound to be full of lessons and importance, and despite all odds, ours were.

I’ve been thinking a lot about endings lately. As an account of pandemic experiences, this blog is naturally fading out as my life fills with activities that keep my weekends busy and my writing time cramped. It’s been almost a year and a half, and to be honest, I’m not quite sure when to cap myself off. Can we call the pandemic over, at least in the US, when a certain percentage of us are vaccinated? When all masks suddenly go on-sale at retailers nationwide? What does it mean for our lives to be back? My titles are already quickly becoming outdated, as isolation has ended, for the most part. For now, I think I’ll wait for the return of certainty, of concrete trust in the plans one can make a few months in advance, of the final meeting on some “Updated COVID-19 Student Handbook”. Looking back, we’ve made it. We survived. This won’t be the last post, so don’t worry (or, alternately, rejoice, if you’ve been praying on my downfall). I’ll see you when I see you.

XOXO, Quaranteen