By Anton Dedvukaj
I’m currently writing this on March 12, 2021. Tomorrow is March 13, 2021. One year since March 13, 2020. We can call that day many things. The day former President Trump declared coronavirus a national emergency. The day that school was first announced to have been closed for two days in the following week. The superintendent’s conference day that ended up lasting six months. You get the gist.
Oh how stupid I feel for openly celebrating the impending “two week break.” Oh how dumb I feel for not taking this virus seriously when it first hit. Oh how idiotic I feel for not even expecting COVID-19 to impact my life whatsoever!
One year. It has been one whole year since the day life as we know it changed. And it seems likely that we won’t make it two. The administration is attempting to open up IHS again. The Biden administration is promising to have all adult Americans vaccinated by May. We have three competing vaccines to help us fight the virus. Provided social distancing and mask rules are followed, we could very well have a normal 2021-22 school year.
So, about that year. As a teenager in this pandemic, I feel as though it is important to document my experiences for posterity. My ninth grade writing teacher told my class to keep a journal where I document my experiences. I did so from March 18 until June 16, and reading through it months later was interesting. I started out with long, drawn-out paragraphs about life as someone who was bored and stuck at home. Then, April and May hit, and I found less and less to write about. I started writing about TikTok videos I made or TV shows I watched when I should have been writing about memories I should have been making with my friends. I feel as though this excerpt from the entry from May 9th summed it up quite nicely:
“A boring day. A boring week. A boring month. A boring quarantine. Overall, I’m still very much bored.”
I am not kidding when I tell you that this was my whole entire notebook entry for that day.
And many variations of that excerpt were basically what I wrote down in that journal for the final month, save for the occasional interesting thing going on. I would count down the amount of days left until the end of school, or until my birthday, which was only a few days later. After that, I would make sure I had two sentences and called it a day.
Quarantine was boring. You don’t need me to tell you this. But during the summer, things were looking up. I was able to go out with restrictions. I made some fun summer memories with my family. But then, school returned, and now we didn’t even have the luxury of no tests or completion grade assignments. It was normal school’s workload and schedule, without the full in-person experience. And if it wasn’t for those half-weeks where I could see my friends, I’m fairly certain I’d be worse off for it. Since it was safe, of course.
But now, we’ve made it to a year. Let’s hope an end is in sight, and that the next school year can occur maskless, without social distancing, and, most importantly, normal. I realize that this is very wishful thinking, but if we can go back to normal in a safe manner, then I am fully in favor of doing so.
