Commentary on the Coronavirus: A Recreation

I wrote something back in June. I lost it recently. It was about the pandemic and it felt important, so I’m going to try to recreate it here.

It was a Thursday and one theatre student had managed to put together a performance a couple days before everyone had to return home. We were told Tuesday night and we had to leave Saturday afternoon. In between packing and school and saying goodbye to friends and life happening, there was this theatre performance. A goodbye for the performances that wouldn’t be finished now that we had to leave. I went with two friends, not excited about how much it felt like a goodbye. I remember sitting in those slightly uncomfortable auditorium seats and listening to a song of a musical that was never finished. I sat there and listened to “In the Beginning” about an apocalyptic world in which going above ground was the ultimate rebellion. It felt so familiar, even though I had never heard the song before. This group of performers, some seniors, would never be reunited in the same way again. I listened to this song and never felt so strongly that this was the end. It felt poetic, listening to that song. It felt like someone had hit the pause button. On the musical, on my life, on the world. Someone hit the pause button and I didn’t know when they would decide to hit play again. I wasn’t sure if they would ever decide to hit play again. Maybe they would keep it on pause and press fast forward so that each frame slid past achingly slow for much too long.

Back in June, when I originally wrote this, when I originally remembered this moment, I wondered when things would be back to normal again. Back in June, people said maybe by the summer, or by October, maybe then life can resume. For a lot of people it did. For a lot of people they went back to work, back to school, back to seeing friends and coworkers. For me, and most of my classmates, we got used to online schooling. It seemed like a reasonable alternative, but it didn’t feel so reasonable. My life had just begun at college. I felt like I was learning who I was for the first time, and back home with online college all I learned was how to hide that beginning person away. So when I remember back to that moment, to that feeling of the whole world being on pause, I remember too my actions afterward. Because I wasn’t one of the people that left on that Saturday. Instead, I applied to stay on campus. Yes, out of fear of what the pandemic was like back home, but also because I wanted so strongly to keep that feeling of home for as long as I could. None of my close friends stayed on campus, only about 60 people did. For the one week I stayed there, it felt like I was a ghost. Seeing another person around campus felt like a surprise each time. So after a week, I decided I had enough and came home. I knew it wasn’t so much the campus that made me feel home, but the people on it. But because of my desperation to grip onto anything that made me happy, I forgot that.

I returned home and I lost most of the fulfillment I got out of taking classes. I lost the fulfillment of seeing friends and being crazy and nonchalant about the next challenge. Right now I’m finishing my first fully online semester, and I feel like I’m just starting to remember that college can be fun. We’re supposed to be going back to campus in the spring and I’m worried that when I go back to campus I won’t ever have that same feeling again, of being young and crazy and unbothered. And that really really sucks.