Non-Fiction

Such a simple act reveals a hidden world of hope.

 She answered my Skype call with her body angling away from her screen, leaning back against her chair. Behind her I could see a foggy sunset on an autumn day in New York City, the maple leaves changing hue, mist accumulating on the glass pane window.

She would occasionally glance at me, but other than that cast a bemused look around, her eyes darting around her desk and wall. She barely opened her mouth.

In the silence, I could hear the leaves rustle outside. I slammed the volume-up key on my computer. Max volume. The sound of birds wrestling continued, their feet gritting against the branches of the trees.

She was in her college dorm room. Grey shelving housing her familiar white violin case and tennis balls behind her. Books strewn all over. It was so different from her home back in the Philippines. The Fitbit she wore on her left wrist and vowed to never take off was gone at last.

That’s how long it had been.

“Hello?” I said. The word slowly traversing the space between us, crawling into the microphone.

“Hi.”“Long time no talk yeah?”

“Um, yeah I guess.”

It was as if all the time we spent together when she was still in high school, all the hours of being violin stand partners rehearsing in our school’s orchestra, all the inside jokes, all the romance gossip had been erased, like faint pencil lead on basic addition worksheets from elementary school: indistinguishable.

As I was consumed by the demanding workload of the rigorous high school International Baccalaureate program while she was preoccupied adjusting to her new independent freshman college lifestyle, learning to budget finances, familiarizing herself with the campus and neighborhood, and attending classes, we let two years drift between us. We broke our promise to continue “keeping in touch”.

But to my relief, after a couple of minutes of hammering the partially refrozen ice between us, we were back to cracking inside jokes from music class, listening to our favorite song “You and Me” by Marc E. Bassy, and, best of all, making kwento. She told me about her new friend Emma from Jakarta, and I updated her on the new members of our high school’s orchestra and this year’s annual Christmas karaoke performance by our vice principal. My voice was hoarse when I ate dinner that night.

We continued to talk often and I learned about how she was coping with this pandemic, living alone for the first time in her life. She was, at times, anxious, her mouth trembling and her hand tapping her desk at every thought. Occasionally, a tear was shed.

Talking to each other and getting caught up in each other’s stories for hours, would teleport us to the two chairs in the second row of the first violin section of our orchestra, when there was no virus and when we could walk the halls of our school. It provided comfort and reassurance in an anxiety-filled environment and national panic.

I soon realized how something as minute as a short video call with my old friend has filled the void of loneliness that quarantine has bestowed upon me. Reconnecting was my outlet, a time I could relax for a moment and forget about the harsh new reality. Rescuing a connection from being severed, knowing you’ve secured another lifelong friend, overwhelmed my body with joy and relief like no other.

Quarantine has taught me the importance of being open and outgoing, reaching out and initiating conversations with others. It taught me the importance of catching up with old friends and not letting those connections get severed. But more importantly, from these conversations, I realized the gold pot of knowledge waiting for me to discover, narrowly hidden behind a simple “Hey!” text.

These calls define my quarantine experience so far, an opportunity to unplug my body from this tough reality and reattach myself to old friends, the ones who shaped me.

My dog Penny, an eight-pound Maltese-Yorkie mix, curls up next to my legs. She doesn’t know any better. For her, the world hasn’t changed. If anything, it’s improved tremendously. Her humans don’t have to leave the house every day and return only after the sun has set. We no longer go to God knows where, for countless hours at a time, then have the audacity to not even bring home treats.

My life, however, has changed–for the better or worse, I’m not quite sure.

For the better, I have a lovely girlfriend. The Sunday before our spring break I had this friend over whom I’ve liked for a while. When we received news that we wouldn’t have school the next day, we instantly decided to have a sleepover. I asked her that night if she wanted to be my girlfriend. She said yes. For the worse, I haven’t been able to see her in person for over a month due to social distancing, but without quarantine we probably wouldn’t be dating in the first place.

For the better, I have all the time in the world to draw and write to my heart’s content. I love writing and drawing, but homework and other activities keep me so busy I barely have time for my creative pursuits. For the worse, I no longer have band, choir, theater, or dance practice. The main reason I don’t have time for writing and drawing is that I’m already preoccupied with the other activities I genuinely enjoy, some of which I can’t pursue later in life.

For the better, I’ve gotten to spend more time with my family than I have in years and have reconnected with old friends from middle school. I’ve felt less guilty about not being there for my little brother. Now I’m stuck in a house with him, and he can play Minecraft and Legos with me as much as he wants. For the worse, I can’t even talk to some of my friends with strict parents, because they’ve had their phones taken away. Some of those people are my closest friends, and it includes my girlfriend.

Life is different. It’s not good or bad; it’s just a new type of normal. Penny stretches out and yawns, still snuggled up by my side. For now, she keeps me grounded in the present, and all I can do is wait and see what the future holds.

 

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.