Non-Fiction

I imagine a green lake in summer, students laughing over tea or chips, backpacks glittering in the sun. I do not remember my last day at campus so I imagine how it must’ve been. Perhaps, a morning class on post-colonial theory. Being yelled at by the librarian. Sharing chocolate with my best friend, telling her about my latest heartbreak, walking among rain-scented trees.
*
The news tells us that Italy’s death toll has crossed China’s. My friend, quarantined in her apartment in Rome, posts pictures of chocolate pancakes and Dalgona coffee on Instagram. In the crowded subway, some passengers are wearing masks. The virus hasn’t reached my city yet. I remember thinking that maybe it won’t.
*
We’re in the middle of an online class on Boccaccio and the Plague when news of the first death hits us. An old man, in a hospital a few streets away from where I live. We pause and talk about our anxieties for a bit, complain about housework and running out of rations. Our classes are so informal now, filled with memes and late-night rants. We’re all so lonely and hungry for stories, for each other.

*
Some days, I just lie in bed, staring at the death toll on my phone. A while ago, it was barely a million. Now more people have died in the United States than Spain and Italy combined. I think about how New York has always been the epicenter of all the bad stuff in Hollywood’s apocalyptic films. I think about soldiers breaking into abandoned old-age homes in Spain, greeted by corpses and rot. Except for the whirr of the fan and the occasional cry of a bird, the world is strangely silent, as if in collective mourning.
*
My part-time freelancing gigs disappear or get drastic pay cuts. I’m in the final semester of my English degree and I don’t have a plan for what’s coming next. I envied my classmates who already had contracts for full-time jobs or were accepted into PhD programs abroad. Suddenly, people are stranded in countries they cannot call home, the oil prices are in negative and the economy is in tatters. The truth is, we never had a contingency plan for the future, let alone the apocalypse.
*
My friend in Rome sends her pancake recipe. In my first try, I burn them. I run out of cocoa powder in my second attempt. In between, I worry a lot, about job prospects, my father who goes out to buy rations every two weeks, the neighborhood boy who I loved and who lied to me, my unwritten term papers. I feel guilty about worrying about banal things in the middle of a pandemic, but I cannot help it.
*
Death is a dark mirror that refuses to reflect our faces. It horrifies and frightens us, and so we take turns veiling the mirror, with our stories, our promises, our efforts and our prayers. After all, it is all we can do, the only magic that we know.

Nature has told me a secret. She noticed me, lonely and unwell, and took pity on me. She has whispered to me just look, and she has become my friend.

She’s not a gentle friend. She rolls her eyes when I’m sad and tells me she has seen people smaller than I survive true apocalypses. She makes fun of me if I ever think the world is ending. “How very self-centered,” she says. So I try not to think that.

First she told me to remember myself. I laid down in the mud and tried to go outside my mind, to cast off my eyes, shackles to blue light, and my thoughts, revving their engines but going nowhere. It was not easy work. Nature spread sun on my skin and massaged my scalp. And for a moment I could feel nothing but the breeze, her water-tinged kiss, and the mud, and the many things beneath the mud, all unaware that you have to wait in line to go into Trader Joe’s, that essential workers are making starvation wages, that gas is cheap. For a moment I remembered what it might’ve been like before I was born, or maybe how it felt to be five and sure about things. Then someone honked their horn on the highway behind the trees and it was over.

Next she took me out to show me what I had not seen in years. We sat in the driveway after it rained and counted worms— seventeen, disgusting and sweet, scrambling slowly for the earth they thought was here. We climbed a tree. There were three empty nests in it, all well kept. “Two for birds and one for a squirrel,” she told me. I asked where they were, if they knew that there was a shelter-in-place order. She didn’t think that was very funny. We leaned over a fence to look at a brown duck, asleep on a little rise of dirt in the middle of a pond. I hoped she was pregnant. Nature promised me ducklings. We got up early and listened to all the birds in my backyard— chickadees, robins, sparrows, crows. I couldn’t find them in the trees. I tried calling back to them, and they answered. I hoped they could find me. She pointed out my window once— a rabbit. He twitched his whiskers at us. He was eating the plants my mother had just put outside. Another time, it was I who spotted the newcomer,— a turkey, all on her own, wandering through the yard and looking for her friends. She almost gave my dog a heart attack. Sometimes deer pass through, sometimes a stray cat. And so I slowly stopped feeling alone.

She tried emptying out my lungs, scooping up all the car exhaust and homework assignments that had accumulated in them, but I filled them back up with pollen and Zoom meetings. She told me she was giving up on me.

But she wasn’t. She was only teasing.

A few nights ago, Nature and I sat up late and watched the supermoon. It looked close enough to swallow, like a big yellow gumball that would illuminate me from the inside out. But this, too, wasn’t true. In fact, it was still 357,034 kilometers away. That’s more than a million feet, for those who have been thinking in sixes. “But it’s still right there,” Nature whispered, “for all of us to see. Think of everyone who can see the moon right now. More people than you could ever meet.”

I have, once again, become a part of an ecosystem, instead of simply mastering one. I want a lot to change right now, but I am happy, at least, for this.

Coronavirus already lurked around the corner by the start of 2020, but its impact on my life and everyone around me gradually took a more defined shape as the curve experienced exponential growth.

By the end of my spring break, the virus started to spread rapidly on the East Coast. I received a three-day notice of eviction from my college housing. Most of my friends hadn’t even returned from their trips. Nobody prepares for such an unprecedented event, but a thousand-dollar flight to another end of the globe, risking visa status and stable academic track, really put me at a dilemma.

I decided to go home because I couldn’t afford the out-of-pocket costs in the US as a low-income international student. I was fortunate to stay in a healthy community, but COVID-19 hits the financial situation of our family hard. My parents’ income dwindled in half, while my paid internship this summer was canceled. To support our family, I spare some working time to assist my mom with her food business. Days that I would have normally attended Stat classes and gone to discussion groups are now spent on washing vegetables, making spring rolls, and delivering.

If college fosters a rigorous schedule filled with boundless on-campus events, going back home means adapting to your family’s lifestyle. It starts out with sharing a bedroom with my little sibling, so no more all-nighters with coffee and a bag of chips to finish my essay. Instead, I go to bed at 10:30, an unimaginable bedtime for millennials that are used to compromising our sleeping habit for academics and extracurricular projects.

In such times of hardship, I find comfort in realizing I’m not alone in navigating the challenges COVID-19 poses to a low-income family. I was touched at the immediate emergence of student-led mutual aid to assist those in difficulty after the university’s eviction. My friends constantly checked up on me and introduced me to different funding resources to alleviate the financial burden. Zoom is a bit of a glitch, but professors were understanding of time zone difference to accommodate my case. Home is not the best environment to allow me to entirely focus on academics, but my family always tries their best to give me a comfortable study space.

I feel moved, supported, and fortunate. But I couldn’t help but notice the tremendous class disparity in times of global pandemic. Not everyone has the privilege to perceive quarantine as an occasion for “refreshment” or “self-growth” by chilling in vacation homes and baking multiple versions of banana bread. First-gen low-income students, sons and daughters of blue-collar workers who got laid off amid a severe economic crisis, are struggling to put enough food on their plates.

All that remains is this – a bag of ukel, figure-eight shaped pastries from Kotagede, an old neighborhood in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta. Ukel is sweet and crunchy, and I like to have it in the mornings with coffee. A month ago, I was eating it every morning. On a gap year before college, I had been living in Kotagede with a homestay family for six months, sharing meals, a bathroom and tons of time together. I had happily fallen into a rhythm with them. My bed in their home no longer felt strange and uncomfortable. It was my bed. It was home.

In late March, I was sent back to the United States due to COVID-19.

My homestay mother was very upset – not just that I was leaving, but that I was leaving so soon. That I hadn’t had time to see everything in Yogyakarta that I needed to see. Most of all, she was concerned that I wouldn’t have enough time to get souvenirs to bring back to my family and friends in the United States. The morning of my flight out, she brought me a huge bag of Indonesian snacks and goodies for back home. On top of the bag were the two parcels of ukel – my favorite food and something that I couldn’t wait to share with my friends and family back home.

The first bag, she told me, was for myself and my family. The second bag was for my friends, people that didn’t live in my house. As I was packing my bag to leave, my homestay mother was sternly giving me instructions – the ukel was fresh, so I was to eat it with my family as soon as I got home, and to pass it out to my friends in the next few days. Ukel only has a shelf life of two or three days once it’s opened, and maybe a week or two at most in a bag like this. You can’t get it anywhere except Yogyakarta.

By the time I landed in Richmond, my hometown, the world had changed. My parents were afraid to hug me at the airport for fear that I had brought the virus with me. The morning after I landed, my family and I ate the first bag of ukel, but the second is still there, on top of my desk. I haven’t been able to see any of my friends yet to pass it out because no one is leaving their homes. I’m too afraid to open the bag myself, to taste how stale Yogyakarta has become. I’m grateful that I’m healthy and had the means to get home, and I’m lucky that both of my parents have kept their jobs, and that I’m not stuck in Indonesia because of closed borders, but my mind keeps wandering back to this bag of old, hard memories on my desk, fading by the day, practically already gone.

I have only seen one human being in over a week. Only one person that I have interacted with in any significant way since I arrived home from college. I forget I exist, mindlessly floating from one side of my hotel room to the other, with no one to remind me that my words and actions have some tangible impact on the world. Quarantine in Singapore is different. I am to wait out the two week incubation period of COVID-19 in a hotel room before I return to my family, ensuring their safety from the virus I could have invited home from college. It is an all-expenses-paid getaway, courtesy of Singaporean taxpayers, if you will. Except I am not getting away. I am stuck; suffocatingly alone and silent in this too-white hotel room I was ferried to upon touchdown. I try to drown out the static with music and college lectures – they don’t break my torpor, but at least it is not so quiet anymore.

Warm food is left at my door by an invisible man. I hear his light tread approach with the squeak of a cart in tow, the shift in pace as he slows just enough to place the tray in its designated spot and ring my doorbell, and then the disappearing sound of his footsteps and existence. When I open the door to collect my meals, the only signs that anyone has been on the luxurious red carpeting in front of my door just seconds before are the tray of food and the already disappearing impressions of my invisible man’s footsteps on the carpet.

Mornings and evenings are spent on the balcony with my coffee cup for company, listening for the sounds of a world that is utterly unreachable. Some mornings, my neighbor emerges from the glass doors of room 918 and leans against the railings of his balcony as I do- a stout Asian man, likely double my age. A “Hi” struggles to leave my mouth before getting caught behind my downturned lips as we make eye contact, and wordlessly we exchange an acknowledgement of the others’ presence. I look away quickly; it feels uncomfortable to be seen after spending so much time blending into the walls and sheets of my hotel room. We are lovers for two weeks only, sharing and relishing the three seconds of intimacy passed between our eyes in the morning sun. A thick, unspoken gratitude hangs in the air between our balconies, and I will never know his name.