Non-Fiction

March 14th: two hundred cases within the county and counting, and the world holds its breath behind closed doors. Saturday morning: I make it to my shift at the coding studio, and find it virtually empty.

“No one’s arrived for our Junior class,” Ann, my boss, tells me. “But some of the older kids are in the other room.” The desks there, typically arranged side-by-side, are now six feet apart and sparsely occupied. As I drift between them to check up on students, I share an uneasy glance with my coworker, Nat. The future hangs over us like a tenuously suspended sword.

I’m not sure who I expect to see when the bell over our door rings, but it’s definitely not Mila, one of our Juniors, making a beeline for our usual classroom. Inside, I find her singing Happy Birthday under her breath while applying a coat of hand sanitizer.

Two choruses later, she looks up at us expectantly. Nat and I blink at her, then at each other. “Um —”

“Hi, Mila!” Ann takes a seat, saving us from making up an agenda on the spot. She has a knack for endearing kids to her — “They’re way more fun than adults!” — and sure enough, Mila breaks out into a grin.

“I don’t have school this week,” she informs us, “and I’m getting ice cream later! My favorite’s Rocky Road, but Mommy wants vanilla.” As we agree that Rocky Road is obviously better and avoid examining why she doesn’t have school, Ann sets down a flat box she’d brought in. On its cover is a turtle with a laser strapped to its shell, gaping at a gemstone. “ROBOT TURTLES: The Game for Little Programmers” is emblazoned across the top. Nat and I blink at each other again.

“Robot Turtles!” announces Ann, taking out the game board and some cards. The goal, she explains, is to lead the turtles to their gems using — “Algorithms!” interrupts Mila — to guide them. Ann lines up a few cards, each marked with an arrow. “They go where you tell them to!”

An unfamiliar silence surrounds us as we arrange our sequences. Normally, the room is laced with the quiet murmur of students, assembling snap circuits or wondering what a for-loop is. But not today. At home, their parents are likely explaining how a virus spreads, or reading their district’s plans for online learning. Wondering what happens next.

After Mila reads out her finished instructions and her turtle claims its gem, we shuffle the tiles and keep playing. Round after round, the world narrows down to the four walls of the classroom and the four of us inside.

When Ann finally says it’s time to go and passes around the hand sanitizer, we join in when Mila starts singing. She wraps me up in a hug, and some weight heavy with finality settles in my stomach. I’m not supposed to play favorites, but there isn’t much of a choice today.

Mila skips out the door, one hand holding her mother’s and another clutching a fortune cookie from the stash on our front desk. Hours later, after Ann says she’ll see us soon and we try not to think about what soon means, I grab one for myself.

Eventually, a wrinkled strip of paper lies amidst the crumbs on my palms. In navy text, it reads: Have faith in tomorrow, even in hard times.

I don’t know what tomorrow holds, or when I’ll see Mila again. But I hope she gets her Rocky Road ice cream, and I hope it’s delicious.

The last time I saw my family, it was the day before Mother’s Day. I decided to arrive early, just in case Scotland went into enforced quarantine and I couldn’t come and see my mum. So, late in the afternoon, my boyfriend and I bought some blow-up balloons and mother-themed gifts and made the forty-minute drive to my old house.

My mum seemed mildly happy to see us. She wouldn’t let us hug her, but it wasn’t clear if this was due to health or personal reasons—after all, I had always had a strained relationship with my mother. I spent all of my adolescence in a constant state of desperation to be loved and acknowledged by her, only to be quietly rebuffed at every juncture. This trip was one of the many grand displays of affection I attempted to try and facilitate some kind of maternal response.

The niceties continued for a little while, my boyfriend and I discussing our lives and in turn, my parents discussing theirs. We gushed over the family dog, and quietly drank the lukewarm tea my mother provided for us. Things seemed to be running relatively smoothly, and I sat a little more comfortably on the living room sofa.

She suddenly and with no warning, snapped into a lecture about how I was using my boyfriend as a crutch to avoid adult responsibilities. Her tangent continued to build and build, like toy blocks in someone else’s happier childhood, as she began to mention that my autism and social anxiety weren’t reason enough to take a gap year. One of her particularly unfortunate (and probably politically incorrect) quotes being, “If people without legs can travel across cities for work, you don’t have an excuse.”

I burst into floods of tears, and quickly left. A few days later I sent an email to her and my father saying I could no longer remain in contact with them. She didn’t respond.

However, my premonition had been correct. Soon after, Scotland was thrust into an involuntary quarantine and I spent the next few weeks with crippling guilt. How could I abandon my family, when other people were praying for their relatives to survive? Everything I was reading was telling me about the value of family and community, and I felt shame and self-hatred at my privilege. Nobody I knew was dying, and yet here I was rejecting the things I had.

It took me a long time to realise that my loss was justified. Maybe my family hadn’t died of Covid, but I was still experiencing the emotional destitution of losing them. It was so difficult to voluntarily isolate yourself from your family when everyone else was praying to have theirs back, but it was the right thing to do. Quarantine took things from me, but it also gave me a greater understanding of what a healthy family relationship looks like- something I never had, and never would have with the people who raised me. I chose to dedicate the rest of my time in quarantine to forgiving myself for the difficult decision, and helping those who were experiencing loss and bereavement, whether it was by choice or by Covid 19.

 

 

We are going to be inside a long time, we are told. My brother and sister wallow in the petri dishes of their video game controllers and phone screens. Recently, I have been telling you about the night sky in the Appalachians, about how the stars there shine like my two eyes in a dark empty home, about how it is beautiful, almost kismet, that I cannot take a photograph of these stars. This is only to reassure me that there is some deep superiority in a traveler falling asleep between the rustle of the longleaf pine, the taste of root beer sassafras deep in her mouth, the glint of mica like stars, rather than me falling asleep between the ambient mountain-winds and babbling-brook setting of my alarm clock. I have been told that you live very far away. You are no different from the fingernail-thin, silk-slip flowers on the lawn that I cannot go out and touch. The hammock hanging in the front yard between two elms is heavy in the middle with mold. We will throw it out once this mess is over, my mother says. We pour rubbing alcohol everywhere, even on the windows. Last night I opened my window to hear the hollow rasp of the cicadas and my brother shut it on my fingers. I think that I love you, or maybe I have been wanting to tell you that if you drop a phone on the surface of the Sahara sand dunes, it is lost forever. You can claw and claw through the sand, but the dunes are like water, and your phone is in the depths. I don’t know what this means yet, but I’ll tell you. I have time.

When I went back to our college apartment after a month of staying with my parents, I half-expected one of my roommates to be standing at the kitchen sink. Instead, the empty entryway greeted me, steeped in soft gray light, shards of sunlight from the large window glinting off of the metal cabinet handles. The front door shut heavily behind me. The apartment was silent.

All three of my roommates had moved back with their parents, and two of them lived out-of-state, so I was here to adjust the thermostat and check the apartment. More importantly, I was here to retrieve an assortment of things I’d left behind: my large squirrel mug, my hammock, my D&D character’s kazoo. I set my backpack on my bed and carefully, deliberately slid my belongings inside as if I were preparing for a long journey. At the beginning of the semester, I’d imagined what we’d do with these items. I’d envisioned hanging the hammock on campus near dusk and reading The Lord of the Rings with my girlfriend. I’d assumed the kazoo would take its place beside my scattered dice as my six friends and I gathered around our large plastic table, and played games of dragons and shadowy islands.

The strangest thing for me was that, looking around the apartment, I could still imagine any of those things being possible. The apartment mostly hid the fact that everyone had moved out; only in more obscured areas, like inside the refrigerator and underneath the beds, were there obviously emptied spaces. The shelf by the door still held several battery-powered candles and our Mason jar of bubble tea straws. The dishes were still stacked where I’d put them to dry a month ago. Our schedules from the spring semester – a detail that impressed any adult who visited – remained taped to the wall. It was as if I’d returned home to find one of the few periods when everyone else was at class.

Like those periods, the apartment felt paused. Everything was still, holding its position until everyone came back. Even the bedroom light waited thirty seconds before turning on – long enough that I wondered if there was a power outage – as if the electricity was hesitating in the wires. For a second, I imagined staying in my room for the next few months, waiting for everything to return to normal, but then I zipped my backpack and turned back to the door.

It had felt like an ending as all my friends moved, one by one, off-campus. It hurt to stand in our familiar apartment that seemed to claim everything was okay when it wasn’t. Still, I left the dishes on the drying rack and the loose papers scattered across my desk as if they were promises: promises that soon, soon, we would all return and pick things up how we left them.

 

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.