The day the world changed.
I remember hearing about the looming threat of a disease called COVID-19 and thinking there was no chance it could even remotely affect me. I remember being upset that a friend’s birthday party had been canceled over this disease which was surely no big deal. And I remember my parents reading me the email that school would be shut down for two weeks.
As my brothers and just about everyone else in my grade celebrated over the impromptu two-week vacation, I was left with a sense of dread that everything would be different. I was in 6th grade when school was canceled, and as slowly as those days moved by, they were the fastest two years of my life.
First, it was the nationwide lockdown that left everyone stuck at home, then almost all air travel was blocked, and then there were shortages of virtually everything. The world was left in a state of panic. Every day, the death toll rose significantly, and yet it was still growing exponentially. My hopes for the end-of-year tug-of-war and book bowl were crushed, although they now seem like arbitrary issues.
After both the longest and shortest summer of my life, it was the beginning of 7th grade with the new hybrid schedule of alternating days of online and in-person learning. As someone who, when presented with online work, simply doesn’t do it, this wasn’t an ideal situation for me. As someone in cohort B, my ‘first day of school’ wasn’t even spent in the building.
Instead, I was at MVP with my friend, swimming and relaxing in the sun all day. It was my perfect start to the year, and I wish I could continue the tradition. Every year since the start of COVID-19 has felt like some twisted, more insane iteration from the previous year that only gets worse. As both my academic and social life become increasingly difficult to maintain, I look back on 2020 in a different light.
It might have been difficult at times to deal with the loneliness of quarantine, but I think it changed the course of our world in an insurmountable way. Although it’s been almost four years since the lockdown first began, I feel no different than I did then; in the span of these four years, I have aged four days, and I feel perpetually stuck in the day the world froze.
