Non-Fiction

When COVID-19 first crept into China, most people in Canada could not care less. “It is all the way across the world, it is never going to reach us!” “Our healthcare system is too advanced to let something like that affect us!” Little did they know, COVID-19 extended its venomous claws to Canada only a couple months later. We are now living in a real life Plague Inc. simulation.

Let us take a trip down memory lane to before COVID-19 took over our lives. As a student at the University of Waterloo, we are required to have mandatory co-op, which means that I alternate between school and work every four months. Four months ago in January, I was ecstatic about starting my first real job in the heart of Toronto. I was so excited to make connections in the real world and climb up the corporate ladder. Not too long into my work term, I was hit with a bomb. I was instructed to work from home for the rest of the term – before I was able to make meaningful connections with my co-workers and before I could prove myself to my boss. I was devastated.

With a heavy heart, I reluctantly obeyed the orders to continue my work from home. It was challenging, to say the least. As a new hire, questions arose frequently. Conversations that could have solved the problem in minutes took hours of communicating through email. Since the nature of my job required me to work with new teams every couple weeks, I can’t even say for sure that my co-workers remembered that they worked with me.

Despite all the hardships that came with working from home, I slowly began to realize the benefits. I was too absorbed in my distress to take advantage of the comfort that followed working from home. The four-hour round-trip commute from my house in the suburbs now took seconds. All I had to do was wake up five minutes before work and travel from my bed to my desk. Suddenly, I have so much more free time on my hands. I even found that I work for longer hours when I work from home. Slowly, I became accustomed to working from home. I even started to admire the beauty of it. This urges the question of whether or not going to work physically is even required. Many people have pondered the newfound possibilities of working from home even after the pandemic. Sometimes, change just needs a little push. I no longer regret working from home for my first job; instead, I welcome it with open arms. I am proud to be on the frontier of change, and of a new way of life.

 

I have ADHD and the Coronavirus is going to kill me. I don’t mean my body. I mean my mind. I almost lost my mind before the Coronavirus.

Now I’m back at square one — fighting not to lose the precious ground I gained these past few years.

ADHD causes hyperactivity, attention deficiency, and impulsiveness. If you look at society pre-coronavirus, you’ll see the whole world had ADHD.

Before the pandemic, everyone was constantly rushing from task to task, rarely focused. People acted impulsively, not seeing how their actions affected other people.

When I was younger, I was always jumping from one place to another. I played rough and would accidentally hurt my friends. Compared to me, the world had the worst case of ADHD imaginable. But with Covid-19, something has changed forever, and it scares me.

Before? Life was an amusement park. Now? Everything seems to stand still. Now, there are no sports, no parties, and no life. Quarantine was a vacation — at first. Then suddenly neighbors were getting sick. People started to notice things that had always been right in front of them. It scared them.

I knew the feeling. When I first got help for my ADHD I started to notice more of the world, and it rattled me.

When I started therapy for my ADHD, life became clearer. I wasn’t as hyperactive. I learned how to focus, to stop, notice and appreciate things. In quarantine, we are starting to see, really see, what is happening in the world.

One of my friends told me, “I’m ready for things to get back to normal.”

I hated to tell him things were never going to be “normal” again. We can’t go back. But we can embrace the new normal.

For instance, as life comes to a standstill, we become more aware and see how precious life really is. We see people dying, the economy crashing. We see the way our actions can inspire, or catastrophically affect others.

Parts of our lives that we teens thought would always be there, are gone. No driving lessons, no parties, no hanging with friends outside, and not knowing how colleges will handle this are all thoughts in the high school junior’s mind. That’s why I wonder if, or how, the Coronavirus will kill me? Will it destroy the thing I crave the most — social interaction with my friends?

How long before the next virus? How long before we lose more normalcy?

However, this virus has a silver lining. It changed us. I’ve seen people putting their lives in danger to help others. I know that recovery can be a slow process, because my ADHD therapy took me years.

I had to learn a different way of looking at the world around me. I hope everyone will remember what they have learned. I hope they will be willing to slow down and take notice of other people. Because we need to understand that no matter what, we’re in this together.

My father is hoping that I am the next thing to come through his door. I do not want to conjure images of my absence, filling spaces in him like smokes in a chimney.

In Nigeria, February 27^th was the last day alive.

I love to stay alone. I also permit myself to feel human: vulnerable and invincible; to make an association and to refuse it. When the lockdown began, I felt my world would end because feeling only a part of my humanity is a vulnerability.

My father called me on a Friday, a few days before the interstate transport ban in Nigeria, his voice had a sweat. He’d hoped I would leave the office where I work and take the next bus miles, miles towards him. I didn’t.

In Kwara State, my friends started to flee. Like butterflies scurrying the rubbish pit. They fled, my neighbors. They talked about family, about home and how it holds weight. Family is significant to me too. Well, not as much as I amount substance to myself. This period should preserve me, I’d thought, spare me a time of silence. It did {does}.

Until I feel stoic.

I feel stoic as if it’s the only way to collect myself. That I let go of my family for myself and that I did not care if I implode. At this point, I may.

The last time I called my mother, her delicate voice mothered a salve. Something like rain seeped through me, draped me in a breeze of softness.  I asked to speak with my father but I was unable to.

Poor man, I imagine him imagine me in his bathtub. The water steaming and exuding of detergent. I imagine him walking towards his room knowing that my smell had filled the room. I imagine him calling my name through the walls and asking if I had eaten, or if I’d slept well, called my friends or prayed. I imagine him sniff the smell of my body like air. I did not let him. I’ve deprived the father of his son.

As COVID-19 proves notorious to sunder ties with any association I could keep, it has wound into an agent to screw me. I am held at the throat each week, waiting to develop the symptoms.

As each day dawns, shutters down, I don’t know if we’ll make it out alive. Doubt has tossed me here and there like a sausage fruit.

I wake with a slight headache. I make stew from my nest-like kitchen and I sneeze. I wake with a parched tongue. I wake to have my sense of smell gone, or feel that it is gone. I have diagnosed myself over and over. The symptoms are mind tricks. Mind trick. It’s what my friend calls it. Sheer mind trick! I do not want to not believe it, I do not know what is real and what is not. I do not know what kills me or keeps me alive.

 

 

The sprawling street still bends this way and that, but no longer receives any recognition. No serenade from tone-deaf buskers, no feet stomping their appreciation. Only the lonely groan of a cathedral bell punctuates the eerie silence.

Dull slabs wither in the sunlight. Normally they are the canvas on which art is created; they curl self-consciously, now they are expected to be the final masterpiece.

All is still.

I’m still inside. A stray sock and stack of dirty plates prove it. There’s a pile of unread books – I’ll get started tomorrow – a discarded Rubik’s cube, and a half-finished jigsaw on my desk.

Waves crash violently against jagged rocks over and over and over again. I hit pause. Then change the video. A snowy mountain top. Next. Vast desert stretching out for miles. Click. The pyramids are still standing. Again. The moon appears, disappears, appears, disappears…

A friend shouts from down below. I open the window.

“I’m still here” I cry.

I cry. I laugh. I spend three hours trying to balance a cup on my head. I eat. I eat. I eat.

The street meanders out of sight. I check my watch. It’s stopped. Ha. Time standing still – literally.

I eat. Then glance out the window.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the street breathes. She’s not lonely, she’s relieved.

In a city that was once known as the epicenter of the world’s trade. In a city that was once filled with people of all different cultures and backgrounds walking side by side on the streets and sidewalks. In a city where each train ride was stuffed with people packed like sardines. In a city where you would have the Empire State Building, one of the most known skyscrapers in the world. In a city with marvelous shopping complexes with millions of customers. In a city that was once known as “The City That Never Sleeps” it is almost as if the city has now fallen to rest.

The streets are now devoid of any signs of life. The cars that were once honking at one another are now gone. The bright yellow taxis that lined up against the sidewalk are nowhere to be found. The street vendors that sold a variety of different dishes and drinks have disappeared. In a city that was once known as “The City That Never Sleeps” it is almost as if the city has now fallen to rest.

One might ponder what dreadful event has befallen on this city to cause a drastic change in a place such as this. Was it a tornado? No,— maybe it was a hurricane? I was thinking that it has to be an earthquake? Well it is a tiny microscopic organism known as Covid19. Some people find it difficult to believe that something that small can spread so fast. Some people find it difficult to believe that something so small can ravage a lively city the way it did. Some people find it difficult to believe that something so small can take as many lives as it did. In a city that was once known as “The City That Never Sleeps” it is almost as if the city has now fallen to rest.

The thing that makes Covid19 so menacing is that there is no escape from it. Almost like the apocalypse, you can run but you can’t hide. If it were a hurricane you can just depart the area. Perhaps it was a tornado, then you can just go underground and wait for it to pass by. What if it had been an earthquake, well then you can get to level ground. For Covid19 all we can do is shelter inside of our homes and hope for the best. In a city that was once known as “The City That Never Sleeps” it is almost as if the city has now fallen to rest.

The first time I left New York City in a rush was nine years ago. By then, moving frequently from place to place had become a regular part of my life. Packing a suitcase, organizing moving boxes, keeping quiet during a long car ride—these were among the first skills I developed as a child in constant limbo.

I carried these skills with me to college last fall where I held on to the empty extra suitcases that I moved in with, and saved every large Amazon package that I picked up at the student mail center on West 116th Street. My dorm room was usually an empty space because I often told myself that I would soon have to leave. When the time came, moving out of my dorm two months before schedule was quick and, like always, the car ride back home was silent. Everything in life, I reminded myself as I pulled out my extra suitcases and gathered the leftover Amazon boxes in my room, is temporary.

However, nothing about these times feels temporary.

I am not sure how to mourn the things I used to do because I don’t know if they’ll come back to me as they were before. I don’t know if I’ll need blue latex gloves to comb through a novel when I visit a Brooklyn bookstore again, if I’ll need to bump elbows with my friends instead of hugging them and never letting go, or if I’ll need to wear a face mask when I resume checking off boxes on my Things to Do When in NYC list. There is no waiting suitcase to remedy these thoughts, to sit patiently on a dusty floor until it is time to fall back into routine.

My days here at home are spent watching rising numbers. The commercials on television are already reflecting a changing America. I share articles with my dad that paint a picture of the world post-virus, and look over my mom’s shoulder in the kitchen as we make up for time lost. I avoid news updates by working on assignments, but I am reaching the point where I am starting to avoid those, too.

Simultaneously, I miss and appreciate the things that I previously hated or took for granted. Speed walking to an early morning literature class, wailing sirens on Broadway at one in the morning, bumping into strangers on a crowded sidewalk. A quiet mind mid-hand washing, a short queue, the exchange of awkward smiles between strangers unmasked. The eternal warmth of the sun, the looming height of upstate trees. Silence. The very nature of life itself.