Non-Fiction

I wake up and scroll through the notifications of my phone. It is flooded with messages from the senior’s group chat of my school. Some are talking about how sad it is that the graduating class of 2020 does not get a graduation, while others are saying that it is selfish to say so when there are people dying out there. I am sad as well, but not as much. Have I not come to terms with the reality I have been placed in, like some child? Suddenly, I realize that I have lived this reality before.

Travelling between different continents with my parents who were humanitarian workers, in middle school I ended up in the only place that shared two continents – Turkey, a country wedged between Europe and Asia. There I homeschooled for four years, taking classes online. They were the same as the Pre-Calculus 12 classes I now have online on Microsoft Teams. Other than online school, the pattern of my life in Turkey consisted of baking, going to the nearby beach with the one Korean friend I had in the neighbourhood, and watching movies extensively.

At this time of quarantine, as I use my spatula to swirl the batter in the glass bowl, participate in online classes, take walks with a friend, or plan virtual movie nights – I notice the same pattern from years ago. I feel the same determination welling up inside of me in order to hold on to the health of my mind, to not let go and sink into the pit of desperation. Yet this time, it is different. When I got tired of the isolation and solitude during my life in Turkey, I came back to Canada in 2017. But in 2020, the whole world froze.

This week, there was an announcement here that some restrictions would be loosened. I meet up with my friends in the neighbourhood, and we go biking or sit on the grass and talk. There is none of the frenzy of going from shop to shop, consuming materials. When it is time to go home for dinner, we walk home in the sunset, marveling at the skies. I notice another similar pattern here, one that consists of reminiscing about our childhood, when we used to go out to play under the sun, and in the cool shade of the trees.

Everybody is forced to stop and think. To rest from the strife of life for success and to learn patience, care for family. To remember God. I listen to others’ troubles over a call, and it heals both of us broken human beings. Still I wonder, if I return to that time when I was living my life, will I have changed? God, how long will this be prolonged? Every day I am struck down by the nothingness of quarantine life, but I must say that I am not truly dejected. There is always hope, as long as there is breath and life in the world and as long as the skies can pour out their sunsets. And so, while the world is whirling like a storm and the news is flooded, and death creeps in the fringes of people’s minds – I live on in the still eye of the hurricane.

Before COVID, I was like a racecar driver, always pushing myself to go faster, to work harder. My schedule was packed – high school, hours of extracurriculars, hours of homework, helping my brother with school, and trying to maintain a social life. Hard work, I knew, was the only way to achieve my goal to have an exceptional high school career. Needless to say, I was exhausted. No human can go 200 mph without taking a break.

And then COVID began spreading to the US. Within a week, coronavirus went from seeming so distant to being something I feared. On March 11th, all anyone at school could talk about was whether we would close or not. And that night, the Head of School sent out a newsletter confirming that, after a two week Spring Break, we would transfer to online school.

I didn’t know what to think – it had all progressed so fast. With current events, I was terribly concerned for the millions infected or at risk, as well as those losing their jobs over shutdown. On a personal level, my whole schedule had been thrown off – there was no work, no activities, and no tasks to complete. I thought about productive ways I could spend my break, but I figured for the first few days at least, I deserved an actual break. I binged TV, called friends, and played video games. A “few days” ended up extending to almost the entirety of break. For once, there was no thought of work in the back of my mind.

The day before online school began, however, I began pushing myself once more. I reviewed notes, got ahead on upcoming content, and organized all of my materials. I prepared myself to once more work towards my goal – COVID could not stop me from having an excellent end to the semester.

As online school began, I was shocked to find how easy it was. I only had each class 1-2 times a week and didn’t get much homework. My extracurriculars had either been cancelled or simplified. There was no longer a reason to travel at 200 mph.

For the first time in my high school career, I have time to do things that I love, just for fun. I’ve been reading constantly, allowing myself to get addicted to books in a way I haven’t since childhood. I’ve been working on photo projects, and I take my dog on frequent walks through a beautiful trail near my home. I bake recipes from scratch.

I am so lucky that I have not been too affected by coronavirus, and though the virus has not affected me, the change of pace has. This whole situation has taught me how silly it was to let my life fall into a stressful routine rather than enjoying each day. Going 200 mph does yield great results, but sometimes you have to slow down and enjoy the ride.

An object at rest remains at rest and I am once more on my bed. That is, in quarantine I spend most of my days lying around, eyes glazed to the ceiling, because I feel like any moment I might be dead— but I cannot complete my things-to-do-before-I-die bucket list because Disneyland has closed.

The world is not spacetime for me any longer, if it ever was. In the stale air circulating in this dim room, with late evening light falling through the curtain in puddles, the world feels like it’s been held completely still. I used to think of time in hours. Now I think of time in the number of Gilmore Girls episodes I can watch before the throb in my throat gets too painful and every time I swallow I think I want to die.

I don’t, though. I do not want to die. But in moments of extreme sweat and deliriousness I begin to lose myself. Sometimes I dream submerged in an endless fog, tucked between layers of heat and ice that fold me over a million times til I am crushed to dust. And in times when it gets really unbearable, I can do no more than sit still and marinate in the horrible, overwhelming loneliness as I feel every last bit of agony trickle into my numb toes.

But most days it is not like that.

Most days, I spend my time thinking of moments when quarantine was still a game of circular motion, of time threaded delicately around Mobius strips of video calls and days blurring into one another. And those, maybe, were not so bad…

I hesitate but the thought surfaces anyway; the aftertaste of a good memory floating gently upward. A while ago, there was us, and there was you, floating through a screen, grinning, suggesting we have a fancy lunch together.

I blinked. What do you mean?

But soon I found out this was what you meant: dressing up in tuxedos and old prom dresses to consume styrofoam cups of instant noodles — dancing through screens, your warmth permeating through pixels, turning our rooms into sweeping goldens of ballrooms and glittering chandeliers, and three-piece black suits, and bowties tied the wrong way, and shirts wrinkled at the edges from how you’d yanked it out of your closet five minutes before.

But we were laughing. And times were good.

On those days, I cling onto memories like they’re a lifeline, turning them slowly over in my mind before it dissolves and permeates out like faint dust. These times will not last forever, I remind myself. Even now, I am telling myself that.

Yes, that is what I do. Imagine your smile and a day when I can see it again, in person, with the sun illuminating every bend and curve of your cheeks. It is sometimes quiet, a murmured whisper, but you are there, every time, telling me this—
Hold on. And so I close my eyes, and I do.

When I am writing this, the street beneath my house is completely empty. This is a rare occurrence, not something I thought I would ever have to see. When I look out of my window now, I still expect to see fruit and vegetable vendors hawking their produce in rickety wooden carts, dragging themselves onward on one side of the road, while swanky BMW’s languish on the other side, recovering from the party they were driven to the night before. I expect to see bikes screeching down the asphalt road at wind-like speeds, harnessed all too often by college students, cigarettes dangling from their lips, while a lone, helpless policeman chases them down to no avail, perhaps because they hadn’t cared to wear helmets. I expect to see milkmen cycling to their jobs, weaving through the sauntering herds of cows in a deliciously ironic way.

I still expect to be woken up with a start in the middle of the night by a wedding party dancing its way down this street to the nearest banquet hall, blasting music at a decibel level thoroughly unsuited to the hour of the night. I expect to see people flocking to shanty stores and paan vendors and I expect to see children kicking a ball down the middle of the street on the days when traffic is sparse. I still expect to be greeted with a shrill gust of noise and bustle when I know all too well that I am grasping at straws, at a reality that no longer exists. In the past few months, as the world has veritably changed under the spell of a global health crisis, every time I have opened my window and peered down at the street beneath my house, I have been greeted by nothing but a strong gust of silence: a very different kind of noise altogether.

In recent days, this silence has been deafening. Just as I find myself adjusting to what everybody has been calling the ‘new normal’ and we all lock up and keep our distance, I make the mistake of looking out of my window and into the silence of this street. This empty street now spreads itself like poisonous undergrowth below my house; a constant reminder of how much has truly changed.

The fruit and vegetable vendors have deserted the street-sides; their wooden carts left in shambles and stray spinach leaves littering the ground below. The BMW’s have been driven off the roadside and the bikes no longer make an appearance; their engines have long been lulled into a peaceful slumber. I catch myself, at odd and embarrassing moments, straining my ears to catch even a flyaway note of the hideously remixed Bollywood songs our beloved wedding party was such a fan of. Maybe it’s a delusion, but it seems more difficult to fall asleep without them. The college-going students now smoke in their balconies standing six feet apart from each other, and the occasional policeman who wanders on to this street now wonders where they all are; each has no purpose without the other, it would seem. With the milkmen at home, the herds of cows are free to roam the street with a kind of joyous abandon we all used to have before.

 

I am supposed to loop rubber bands on the metal hooks in my mouth every day. The last time I saw him, he looked sternly at me and said, “Only take them out when you’re eating. You have to wear them all day, every day, for this to work.”

I am surprised my orthodontist doesn’t hate me—if he does, he does an excellent job of hiding it. Or maybe it’s the surgical mask he always wears. If there’s anything that this pandemic has taught me, it’s that it is all too easy to hide your emotions, the pursing of your lips and the wrinkling of your nose, behind the pale green and blue. The masks are to protect us from airborne death, but perhaps they are also a shield for the vulnerability, the exposedness that is the human condition. Maybe now that we’ve discovered that, they’ll never come off.

My mouth hurts, teeth tight and metal scraping against the inside, when I put on my bands for the first time in several days, which is all too often. There is no more scrambling to wear them day in and day out the week before my next visit, hoping to have his mask-clad face nod in approval as he shines a light in my mouth, and scrapes at my teeth with cold metal.

After all, teeth shift back. They are moveable and temporary and it’s not as if waiting an extra month will destroy over a year’s effort of forcing my teeth into place. I think they’re straight enough anyway. The last time I saw my orthodontist, he nodded solemnly, stripping off his latex gloves with a snap, and pushing away in his rolling chair to his desk. The nurse unclipped the bib and let me rinse out my mouth in the little basin. I spat out the taste of plastic and cold metal and ran my tongue over the grooves of my braces, feeling the way the wires cut into soft flesh.

Teeth are moveable things, constantly shifting in their beds. We pay thousands of dollars to move them into straight rows, neat and uniform, but as soon as we stop, they begin shifting back. They remember their places and the gaps between each other, and they want to go home. They are not so unlike us in that way.

I never thought that I would miss waiting in the room with the plastic chairs for my name to come on over the PA system. While I don’t miss the feel of latex fingers prying my mouth open and the bright light making me squint up at my dentist’s face, I guess I miss someone keeping me accountable.

Maybe the masks will become a staple in our lives, and we will hide our smiles and our frowns and our crooked teeth behind the bright cloth. And when—if—we ever take them off, some of us will have gleaming pearly whites and some of us will have spinach and overdue deadlines stuck in the gaps and Clorox stains on our teeth. But for now, orthodontists will fade out of existence because there is no use in making our mouths beautiful when all we can glimpse from six feet away are bloodshot eyes and mask-cloaked faces.

 

 

Sunday, May third was sunny and 70. I went for a run on the four-mile loop from my parents’ house and around Staring Lake early that afternoon. The buds were starting to pop then, bursts of green and pink and white amidst branches that have been bare since October. Lots of people were on the trail—bikers and runners and walkers, a few dogs. I gave them all a wide berth, running on the dirt and grass to get as far away from them as possible. I can’t run wearing my mask, my breath gets all hot and humid and I feel like I’m suffocating. So, I always make sure I’m as close to six feet as I can be away from other exercisers.

On my street, close to home, I stopped to walk the only hill on the entire loop. Despite running most days since quarantine began, I’m still used to the flat trails in Fargo/Moorhead, and the few Eden Prairie hills make me wheeze and puff and feel like giving up. Once home, I showered in my parents’ basement bathroom that I suppose is now mine, and gathered my mother and father in our backyard with my laptop and an extension cord for my college commencement ceremony watch-party.

My virtual graduation from Concordia College was short, less than an hour. Our president spoke, so did the dean and two students, then the list of names of every graduating senior went by in what can only be described as the end credits of a movie. Our names, hometowns, and majors scrolled from the bottom to the top of my screen in seconds. My mother, father, and I barely saw mine before it disappeared. The Hymn to Concordia played when the names were done and then it was over—the conclusion of my four years of college finished in a surreal conglomeration of speeches and a list of names on my laptop that I watched in my backyard. I shut the laptop and unplugged the extension cord, feeling defeated and confused.

One of our student speakers talked about resilience—how all of us graduating are resilient for completing our college careers during a pandemic. But, in that moment after watching my virtual commencement, and now, after being a college graduate for two weeks, I do not feel resilient. I have not survived COVID-19. I am enduring it because I have to. I am anxious. I am depressed. I am a fresh college graduate entering a world plummeting into economic and social disaster, and the only thing I can bring myself to do is run. I run, and I think about how nothing will ever be the same.

But maybe resilience is more than surviving and thriving in traumatic circumstances. Maybe it is acknowledging the trauma and the grief. Maybe it is accepting that nothing will ever be the same.

Maybe it is running when you can’t do anything else.