Poem Schway age 14, Las Vegas, Nevada

I like to glamorize things. Give them a romantic coat of paint and ignore everything questionable underneath. Example: I like to think that if I just lay here, flat on my back, arms pressed solemnly to my sides – that if I stayed here very very still and didn’t move one inch and barely breathed, the Earth itself would start to break open a little bit and swallow me whole. That parasitic tendrils of ivy would come on over and grow up my wrists, baby squirrels would nestle in my collarbones and ladybugs would devour my eyes. I like imagining aesthetically pleasing deaths like that. Being hollowed out from the inside to become home to small woodland animals, flesh splitting from bone almost gently by the ceaseless knife of age, sinking back into the amniotic bath of base elements and microbial nutrients that spat me out into the ether in the first place.

This is what would happen instead. I would tumble into an uneasy sleep and wake up some while later, the precise number of hours uncertain but undoubtedly several too many, eyes shuttering open just a tiny crack to see the post-sunset light drip-drip-drip through the blinds and pool like syrup at my feet. Time, turned to Jell-O. Motivation, sense of self, base human dignity – all discarded in a heap at the curb outside the apartment along with the rotting couch and that incomplete set of chipped Ikea furniture.

The thing is, that’s not very nice to think about at all. So, I just… don’t. I prefer to chase away the bad thoughts and the creeping sense of overwhelming futility with Netflix and junk food. It’s like, hey brain. I’m providing you with fun things. Now give me the happy chemical, would you? Over and over, again and again, day after day until the days blend into an indistinguishable lump of wake up eat sleep wake up eat sleep wake up. Like in third grade art class when you mixed all the paints together, and the red swirled with the blue swirled with the yellow and in the end, it was just a sad sad brown.

I think, as my life trickles by like rusty water from a leaky faucet, as the muscle of brain atrophies and shrivels from disuse, I’m realizing that not even my quarantine bop playlist or a forty-ninth re-watch of Mean Girls (2004) directed by my lord and savior Tina Fey can help me now.

I like to glamorize things, I really do. But this – being alone, being alive, being claustrophobically surrounded by faceless strangers just dying in heaps and clumps every hour and every minute – it’s stripping away the rose-tinted paint, slowly, inch by inch, until all that’s left is the raw and scabbing truth.

Sometimes, life is just fucking ugly.

Suddenly three months have passed, and I am still here, curtains drawn up, letting summer light flood into my room. It contrasts strangely with the fluorescent light bulbs screwed into the ever-spinning ceiling fan—although both are golden, sunlight seems softer, warmer while the fluorescent bulbs are harsher, lonelier. Three months have passed, and I can no longer open my windows in the mornings, letting the spring breeze flow inside. Instead, I have felt the cool breeze transform into something hotter and stuffier, watched as dandelion-yellow spring deepened into burnt-golden summer and the gray rainy season gave away to cotton candy clouds across a blue sky.

Three months have passed, and I still don’t know when things will return to normal. Instead, this is my new normal. Social media is a whirlwind, conflicting sources, tragedy and loss plastered all over the headlines. My father watches the news and recites numbers and statistics to me, and I add them to an ever-growing database in my head. I get used to the fabric of a mask against my skin and become familiar with the six-feet distance I share with others. I miss seeing my friends in person, but I learn to be content with seeing them in pixels through video call.

Three months have passed, and I’ve had time to comb through every inch of my house, examine the crevices, the way the floorboards are slightly warped, the old memorabilia I’ve tucked away in the attic. My mother says I’ve always been one to pay attention to the details, meticulous in my searches, but even for someone like me, there are only so many details that you can comb through again, again, again. You can’t see the forest for the trees, but after you’ve examined every inflection in the trunk, the bumps and nicks of the branches, you’ll eventually see the forest for the first time.

Three months have passed, and I’ve learned (or relearned, rather) to bike. I’m lucky that there is a forest within biking distance. When I am biking, I am moving too fast to see the details, to inspect every leaf. Instead, I am forced to focus on the fleeting things: the way that the trees blur as I ride past them, dappled sunlight flickering in and out of the trees, birdsong fading in the distance. Nature’s beauty comes to me not in small details, but in full pictures, panoramic views. I see wildflower fields, quiet lakes, rustling woods. I braid crowns of wildflowers to rest upon my head and fly kites in the wind—it’s like I’ve learned how to be a child again, find joy in the small things.

Three months have passed, and with school cancelled and infinite minutes to fill my hands, I learn to take control of my own life, choose my own paths. I fill my days with things I’ve never had time for before: origami, language learning, even writing. There is something relaxing and rewarding in folding a crisp mountain fold, recognizing the rounded syllables of Korean, typing away at a computer screen, weaving my thoughts into stories. I decide to learn programming, film history, indulging myself in my interests. I learn how to take care of myself and enjoy the quietness of my own company. My days are wide open, and I fill them with fleeting joys and quiet comforts.

Three months have passed, and it’s likely I’ll watch it become four months, five months, six months from my bedroom window. Perhaps I’ll see burnt-golden summer become vermillion autumn and feel a chill enter the breeze. In that time, my golden fluorescent lights will remain, and I will still be here. Three months have passed, and when four, five, six months still have not returned this world to normal, I will still be filling my days with simple joys because I can do nothing else. When the world is turned upside down, I do the only thing I know how to do: make the best of it.

I live across Burgos Park. A crossed jogging path surrounded by another circular path; Burgos Park is located in the center of the crossroad. Crown grass, Ixora, and golden trumpet flowers foresting the whole park were the reason I walked along the path every night. I was under stress from studying. The park had never been calm, but was always full of dogs socializing with each other, small puppies dipping their noses into the soil, and their guardians initiating new conversations.

The lockdown had totally changed my daily habit. I was not able to go for a walk as much as I used to, as I could not leave my house unless something very urgent popped up. The Burgos Park I saw through the window was now empty and only several sprinklers remained, spouting water onto the plants. One day, I was walking through the park to a grocery store. The crown grass grew so much that it reached my calf, clear dew crowning red Ixora petals, and undergrowth began to blossom under no disturbance. Tiny wildflowers bloomed along the jogging path that was barely stepped on, but frequently cleansed by the sprinkler.

Since the lockdown in March, only a few cars had been fuming into the atmosphere. Before the quarantine, I had to wait around eight minutes for cars to stop to cross the road, which went around the Burgos Park in an endless line. However, that day, I could even walk along the car road. When I looked up at the sky, it was the most blue among the Philippines’ morning skies I’d ever seen. Sunshine of early summer penetrated through white clouds embroidering the sky, nourishing flora of the park.

I noticed several people heading to their destinations with masks on their faces. A family was dragging a stroller under shade of a Dita tree, a woman was chattering with her mother, shopping baskets full of provisions in their hands, and two long lines in front of Robinson’s Mall as always.

Observing people through the window became part of my routine. One day, I was putting my face close to the glass pane, looking outside. I suddenly felt someone’s stare, which was from the apartment in front of my condominium. Leaning his body against the balcony, a boy made eye contact with me. I quickly turned my head and fixed my eyes on the lines of people, but I felt the boy was glancing at me. Eventually, I faced him again with frustration for disrupting my peaceful moment and he avoided my glare, pointing at the looming image of the Sierra Madre around which clouds hovered over their peaks. I thought he could be imagining himself climbing it. I imagined myself doing the same, inhaling fresh air, running through the giant trees, watching myself disappear behind the giant tree trunks.

Two months ago, I sat in biology class frantically calculating probabilities and phenotypic frequencies on a Hardy-Weinberg quiz I wished I had studied for. No less than five minutes after I had scribbled my last answer, the teacher announced that school would be closed until April. Instantly, heads were raised. We cheered, ecstatic that our spring break would be longer, granting us the extra week we all so desperately craved to spend with friends: picture us laughing over milkshakes, Pink’s hot dogs, and that silly biology quiz we all forgot to study for.

What was at first one extra week soon became two, and then three, four, and then the rest of the year.

Today, I revisited my red and gold high school. We were seniors, and we needed to return our textbooks. We parked our cars in the front lot where we used to wave to teachers each morning and watch nervous freshmen hobble out of their parents’ minivans. We dropped off the economics books we never used, cleared old newspapers and history notes from our lockers, and shut their creaky orange doors one last time. We walked past the math building where we met our iconic first friends in geometry and where we later learned to mourn our grades before calculus exams. Past the lunch tables where we crammed Latin, literature, and $2 pizzas from the church nearby and behind the swimming pool where we asked out that boy we liked, we opened our car trunks and waited for our teachers–masked and gloved–to drop off our cap, gown, and diploma before waving us goodbye.

On the way out, we drove past our old science room. We thought for a second that we could see our biology teacher standing at the door as she did each day to greet her sleep-deprived seniors. We remembered those long, hot days when we prayed for air conditioning and excuses to leave class early. No one could forget the tired looks shared after difficult exams nor the joint sighs of relief after they were curved. Nor could we forget that very moment in biology class we failed to realize was our last. One by one, we slipped quietly back to our houses, rooms, and computer screens, understanding what it means to miss something that is now so suddenly gone.

When most people think of something unprecedented, they might think of Charlie Brown finally kicking that football. However, there is another, much more serious unprecedented occurrence happening all around us, which is living with the constant threat of the COVID-19 pandemic. The coronavirus has affected us all in many different ways. It could be anything from being forced to work from home, to staying at least six feet apart from others, to feeling the constant effects of great amounts of isolation and stir-craziness. Whatever comes next with this pandemic, one thing’s for sure: the world won’t be the same.

I have been very fortunate compared to so many others over these last few months, but that doesn’t mean that my life has not been impacted negatively at all. I have, along with many others, graduated from high school this year and coronavirus means that we can say so long to large, in-person graduation parties/ceremonies and say a big hello to a hindered job market. The way I see it though, the reason that this pandemic has been and will continue to be so impactful and bizarre is that close to pretty much everybody living today has not experienced anything like this before. The last widespread pandemic to occur was over one hundred years ago in 1918,— the “Spanish flu.” Thankfully at least in today’s world, we have infinitely better hygiene and cleaning measures than back then. Although, it is important to remember that the only way to reap the benefits of those cleanliness advantages are for everybody to do their part, and embrace them by wearing face masks, practicing social distancing, and engaging in regular hand washing, but I digress.

My utmost sympathies go out to the coronavirus’ victims and their families. If there is any good that can come out of all of this, it’s that people may finally realize once again that petty everyday little “grievances” like one’s looks, and social standing are nowhere near as important as they can oftentimes seem. It’s somewhat interesting, to me anyway, that in the majority of situations, it takes a full-blown, widespread catastrophe to bring human beings closer to one another. At any rate, it’s nonetheless comforting to know that sooner or later, the virus will come to an end, and the human race will overall be able to power through. If there’s one huge take-away from everything that’s been going on, it’s that this pandemic will certainly be one for the history books.

The coronavirus was something that I would have never expected to be a part of my life. I also didn’t expect the virus to get so serious, where school, restaurants, stores, and theaters would all shut down. Throughout this pandemic, I have never realized more than now, that it is so easy to take things for granted, especially things that are special to us. I can’t tell you how hard it is for me, to quarantine myself, all day, every day, only to see crowds of teenagers my age, hanging around in parks, definitely not social distancing.

At first I thought to myself— there is no way this is fair. People my age, going out with their friends, having the times of their lives, while I stay cooped up at home, with nothing to do. I do admit, I was upset for a while. However, it wasn’t until I had a long talk with my brother-in-law, that my point of view started to change. I have a nephew, with a disability, called cytomegalovirus (CMV). I found out from my brother-in-law, that if people with disabilities, like my nephew that I love so dearly, were to get exposed to the virus, it could be dangerous, no matter what their age is.

This is simply why my point of view changed. If I went out, and hung out with friends, without a care, I could bring serious harm to those that I love. Passing on the virus is so easy to do. I couldn’t imagine my world without my amazing, loving, smiling nephew. Sure, he may have a disability, but he is the most loving soul I know, with the happiest heart. His life is not easy as it is, and if he were to get this disease, it wouldn’t be any easier. This is why I quarantine myself. This is why I social distance myself from others. I do this to protect those that I love. I know that good will come out of this, and this pandemic will end. However, I also know that there are so many people out there who don’t care.

So if you’re reading this, just stay home. The next time you’re invited to do something where you would be with a large group of people, just please, stay home. It makes a huge impact, more than you may know. It takes one person, one person—to bring harm to many people around them. Quarantine yourself, so that you may protect those that you love. It will make a difference.