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.
Non-Fiction
Paused
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.
Unveiling
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.
Three Months
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.
Burgos Park
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.
Sentiments of What Once Was
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.