Ah yes, we all have the long, hopeful story of how we grew over the past 2 years. The B.C. (Before Corona) you, the Mid-Corona you, and the Post-Corona you, if we ever get there. Here’s hoping. Blended in with hope and positivity is, of course, tragedy. I myself have felt a bit of this, as many beloved people to me have died in this quarantine. My cousin, the son of my dad’s sister, fell victim to COVID-19 about 6 months ago, followed by my grandmother’s cousin and, not too long after, my mom’s aunt. And that’s just my relatives. There seemed to be a funeral every week throughout the span of time between July and December 2020. With that much death and sorrow surrounding us, I and my family needed some positivity, and boy did we get it. On September 2nd, 2020, we were blessed with the birth of my youngest sister, Sihaam. A blessing until I get annoyed with her, anyway. I jest. She is the best thing to have happened to us in the last 3 years, and the peak and highlight of this pandemic that held us captive for far too long.

And…the future. If I gained nothing positive from this pandemic, at least I learned some lessons about what to expect moving on. I despised 2019 mostly for the deaths of Juice WRLD and Cameron Boyce and swore that 2020 would be better, kickstarting a 2-year jinx of our lives. But I digress from this scandalous assumption. I learned one very valuable aspect of life from my time in quarantine and seemingly eternal boredom. This was my realization during my 2-year long quarantine, that I had taken life for granted. As I lay in bed wishing I could go out to play basketball, watch a movie, go to Six Flags, heck just go walk, I felt handicapped in my own world. I swore to myself at that moment that for the rest of my life, I would enjoy every moment, every smile, every laugh, every blink, every breath. I would never again let a moment pass by without reflecting on it and the impact it would have then and in the future. I would see the future for what it truly is: a chance to rebirth yourself, a chance to redo your past and change it to the best you can. Here’s to the future.

The past years have been a wild ride. I know so many people lost a lot during this time. Things have changed so much, some for the better and others not so much. It is hard to say if I would be where I am now without a Global Pandemic that shook the world. It is entirely possible I would be in a better place without it. However, I try not to think about the ‘what-ifs’, they only lead to confusion and disappointment. My 11^th grade year was cut short and my senior year was entirely virtual. The only time I got to see my friends in one place was as we all walked across the stage during graduation. I had seen a few of them over the past year from a distance, most commonly the foothill of a driveway or from behind a computer camera.

I am thankful that I am still here and well. The time spent alone in my house will never be something I will forget. I learned that I don’t mind speaking to people nor do I mind having something cover my face. Before the pandemic I would have never had guessed that I could live off such little interaction. Social encounters were never my thing, I often froze and was unable to express myself fluently. Now, two years into the pandemic, I have found that I was pressuring myself to interact with people in a certain way. I feared that judgment would come my way even from my closet friends so I would put up a façade hid how I felt. With the time alone I got to know myself better and the social interactions I did have were more meaningful.

It is hard to know what the future will bring. Maybe a new variant, maybe another vaccine or maybe a whole other pandemic. We do not know and only time will tell.

In my Ap Language class back in 11^th grade, we would take some time out of every class to briefly cover ‘current events’. My teacher thought it was important for us to be educated on what was going on beyond the classroom, which I agree with. I think it is necessary to be informed on topics and issues that people are facing around the world, even when not directly impacting you.  We did this all year. Many topics would come up for a week and then drop off the next, cycling through. January brought the Australian Wildfires which we covered every single day, from start to finish. We discussed the devastating effects the bushfires had on the wildlife, where nearly 3 billion animals were impacted in the first half of 2020. January did not only bring the devastating fires but also a rapidly spreading virus in China. I remember scrolling for a topic to bring up in the class discussion, trying to search for something other than the wildfires in Australia. I read how the fast spreading virus in China pushed officials to build an entirely new hospital in Wuhan dedicated to help patients with the new virus, Covid 19. We had spoken about the virus before in class but it did not worry any of us. How could it find its way on the other side of the world to us? It was not till early March when the fear started to set in, but by that time it was already too late.

My school was holding an auction on the Friday night of March 13^th, 2020. I did not attend the attend the event, it was a Friday, and I wanted to go home after a long week of school. I did not miss out on much. Just 30 minutes into the auction, everyone was urged to go home immediately. because of the Covid 19, which at this point had been labeled as a Pandemic for some time now. Later that night, in-person school was canceled for the following two weeks, which later became the entire semester, and we were set to switch to virtual schooling. The teachers had no time to prepare their classes nor did the students have any opportunity to grab anything out of lockers. The school had completely shut down, and it was not till mid-summer when anyone was allowed back in to grab personal belongings.

Summer of 2020 was like no time before and I doubt there will ever be a time like it again. The fear of the pandemic was still alive and hardly anyone left their house. I was one of those who never left, I was terrified of what might happen if I did. With all this time in my house things became stale fast. I needed a new hobby other than scrolling mindlessly on my phone. My first attempt was with paining. I set up a white foldout table and a stool in the center of my room. The small selection of paint I had was placed meticulously in the left hand corner, organized by color. Starting with the earth tones and ending with the pale pastels. A cup of water stood on the right side, teetering on the edge of the table. The brush met the paper and started to deposited the olive green paint as I moved it along in large strokes. Shortly after an oval like figure had been formed I gave up. Painting was not for me. My second attempt at a new hobby was with candle making. At the start of summer I purchased a peach scented candle and that sparked my love for candles so much that I thought I should take it upon myself to make my own. Why buy them when you can make your own? From my brief spout with candle making I learned that it is certainly far more expensive, time consuming, and aggravating to make your own. I suggest buying premade candles to be the best option.

I did not see my friends that summer and I only talked to one on a regular basis. Long facetime calls starting from sundown to sunrise were my only form of social interaction. However, I did not mind. My socially incompetent self, found the time alone to be calming. I went from seeing the same people daily to seeing no one. It was a big change but I enjoyed it. The friend I kept in touch with insisted we spend all this free time we had watching Avatar: The Last Air Bender via facetime, which was one of their favorite shows. I reluctantly gave in, what else was I to do? I had heard of the show and knew many people grew up with it but the show never peaked my interest. We started watching from the top, spending a few hours every other day watching more and more. Unfortunately, we were never able to finish. School started in August which consumed the free time we had previously

one of the biggest silver lining that I’ve found as a result of covid is a greater appreciation of in person school. i would’ve never thought I would take school of all things for granted before covid. I should mention that the only reason I passed any classes in my junior year in high school which was split in half due to covid was because the school said our grades couldn’t go down from where they were before the pandemic. that safety net wasn’t in place my senior year so I was the least bit enthusiastic when I learned we were doing online learning at the start and we didn’t even know if/when we could go back to some resemblance of in person learning. during this time, I’ve also grown to appreciate good teachers even more than before, the teachers at Decatur High worked the marrow out of their bones to help the students. even if I was doing a pathetic job of keeping up, I could see the effort they were putting into everything and i realized I was lucky to have such damn good teachers. although i think i forgot everything i learned that year…that’ll come back to bite me. a lot of the worries we had revolved around our grandmother who we recently moved into the house next door to ours. her along with my brother and mother are at increased risk to suffering from covid for reasons varying from smoking related lung problems to old age. the most frustrating thing by far was convincing my bother to get vaccinated. my dad is a very stubborn man. this is pretty normal, except both me and my brother have become equally if not more stubborn than him. it was hell,, trying to convince someone who was dating a self admitted conspiracy theory beelivers who got most of her ‘credible’ information from tik tok . the olympics in japan were also pretty lame since covid and japan’s execution of the disease  was kinda ruining the vibe. 

 

My memory from back then is a haze, we had no problems transitioning into covid as a family. we socially distanced from our grandmother; hardly went in her house and when we did we wore masks. the only detail I remember is the chaos that ensued over toilet paper. we were blessed that my family did not suffer any tragic losses due to covid despite several of our relatives being nurses on the front lines. I don’t remember any vivid details about the stark differences of our lives around the beginning of covid but my high school began to take action and moved all of our classes online. my mom began to make masks by hand and before you knew it, the next few months sank into monotony. since i am a loser who doesn’t even learn from his mistakes, I am about to pull an all nighter just to get a rough draft finished. if you can imagine someone with the work ethic of a panda combined with the attention span of a squirrel in a playground of a work environment, you’ll get a pretty accurate picture of my productivity during online learning. work piled up like a landfill and I found myself swamped by 2 weeks worth of overdue homework just from math. Don’t get me started on essays. 

I honestly don’t remember what was happening when i first heard about covid. I must’ve been under some disillusion that it wasn’t a bid deal. although i can’t see myself thinking that, i probably understood it was going to get worse but figured people would exercise their brain cells to get our lives back to normal. that last part was definitely disillusional, after what we’ve been through, I’m starting to believe the world (actually just America) is experiencing a collective loss of intelligence. maybe I’m becoming a cynic, but i can’t help but plant my hand into my face as I’m trying to knock sense into people but still trying to bear the pain for them. even if i think they’re absolute idiots, It would be a little bit more than rude to smack someone hard enough to get any worthwhile sense knocked into them. I guess i just can’t comment on late 2019 and early 2020, when i try to think back, it’s all just a blur. I guess i was too busy either getting distracted from working or trying to work and losing motivation as soon as i looked at how much i had to do to pay close attention what was going on in the news. i do remember when my mother decided to start making masks by hand, I took the pandemic seriously when i went outside but i guess i was still stuck in my bubble when it came to the developments in the pandemic. 

Tony Moore

English Composition I

    

 

The past year so far has been a rollercoaster, in my opinion. Its been full of ups and downs, and me jumping into adulthood at a fast pace. Nobody thought the pandemic would still affect us to this day, nor did anyone think it would be this catastrophic event. Covid influenced my future decisions playing in Football, and it also took family and friends away from not only my family but I’m sure a lot of people. It worried my parents and me about future events, and it also changed the way we approach different situations. A good thing I could say is that many money-making ventures were positive with Covid being around; I also enjoyed being in the house during times through the pandemic. This period of time definitely taught me how to be mentally stronger and adapt in certain situations. I believe everyone needed this experience because we often learn things from these events, whether the problem affected us negatively or positively. I will continue to be strong-willed and motivated to continue bettering my life. The pandemic also humbled me in ways that I couldn’t imagine for the better.

 

The last vivid detail, that I can remember, about my social experiences before I had to start worrying about the pandemic was at school. I was home at the time when this new virus started making headlines. My mom usually leaves the TV open on a news channel when she would wake up my little brother and prepare him for school. I would watch it from time to time as well while getting ready for school. The next day, while preparing for school, the TV is on like usual, but this time it was unusual about the headlines that were being made. I changed the channel to another news channel and they would also talk about the same topic. A new virus was discovered in Wuhan, China. 

     The next day was normal and it would stay normal for the next 14 days. The news died down for a bit about the virus and there would be normal headlines again, like a car accident or something along the line of accidents. Life was the same as usual. I would hang out with friends after school and do what most video game-loving teenagers do, play video games. While everyone was having a normal time, the scientists and researchers were about to discover how truly devastating this new virus was.

     14 days was up. December 12, 2019, starting from the core of where the viral infection was first discovered, Wuhan, Hubei Providence, China. People started to become sick, some were experiencing shortness of breath, some were experiencing mild fevers, and worst of all (at the time) some were experiencing both symptoms. From this point on the world fell down a deep rabbit hole. Hospitals flooded with sick patients, and many more on the way.

     Days go by, cases rise and worst of all, people started to die. We weren’t prepared for this virus at all. March 13, 2020, the President announces a nationwide emergency. February 23, 2020, Italy was hit hard and they would soon close their borders. Many countries would later follow in Italy’s footsteps.  The number of symptoms began to increase. These symptoms not only came in pairs, and for most unlucky few they would get the whole package. These symptoms of Covid-19 include fever or chills, coughing, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, fatigue, muscle or body aches, headache, loss of taste or smell, sore throat, congestion or runny nose, nausea or vomiting, and diarrhea.

      There were mask mandates and you now had to stay 6ft away from people. Eventually a nationwide panic. People were stocking up on supplies and some were extremely greedy. Some were scheming, like this man in Tennessee, Matt Colvin, who went around to every store that sold hand sanitizers and bought all of it. He was planning to make a profit but little did he know not only did he not make any profit, but he was also scorned by everyone. Somewhere in 2020, there was a shortage of toilet paper and everyone was literally going crazy over it. Memes were created about toilet paper being used as currency and people were even fighting over a single roll of toilet paper. Schools had to change to online classes. The first choice was an app called Zoom. Zoom was good but like anything that’s related to the internet, it was easily ruined. People were sharing their class codes to the internet and some random people would join in and be disruptive. This was a serious security breach because if a weird person ever got their hands on those codes, they could ruin a kid’s life. People that could work from home were forced to work from home, this policy helped a lot of people, especially office workers because they realized that they do better while working from home than at the office. They were more productive and could finish their task much faster.

     I can’t possibly list out all that happened but there you go. Also, as a side note, when I was talking about security breaches in Zoom meetings, I wasn’t kidding. Recently a Zoom meeting of Italy’s government Zoom call got hacked on live television and the hacker screen shared NSFW content on Jan 17, 2022. 

March 2020 felt like it was a lot longer than 31 days. America was on edge throughout the whole month, wondering what was going to happen to our daily lives. Well, our answer came abruptly, as schools, restaurants, salons, barbershops, sports, and just about every other public attraction shut down. Of course, I wasn’t affected by the schools shutting down, as I was in an online school, but it just added to the tragic nature of the pandemic. The day I knew that our lives were about to go downhill was March 15th, when a normal Sunday quickly turned into a day of foreshadowing for what was to come in the ensuing years. The minute I opened Instagram on that Sunday, the very first post of my feed left me with my eyes wide open. I don’t remember the exact title of the post, but the CDC had put out a statement that a nationwide “quarantine” was soon to begin. Now, as my mind did a flashback to that Saturday morning in December, everything made sense. I quite literally predicted the end of the world as we knew it. Well, let’s not get too dramatic, as the world is still pretty intact, but still, I knew this was going to happen. The puzzle pieces all fit together: Wuhan’s disease, the masks, CNN reporting it, and now it was here. And life only got worse and worse, as a nationwide panic caused a lack of cleaning supplies, toilet paper, and hand sanitizer being the first to go. Oh yeah, and masks. As ironic as it sounds, the one object the world put their faith into was running out, as masks disappeared from stores faster than TV’s on Black Friday. 

Summer 2020 was…not your average summer, to say the least. Instead of “hot *insert gender* summer”, it was hot pandemic summer…hot cases summer…hot-out-but-everyone-in summer…I think you get the point. Instagram and TikTok kept everyone occupied as they couldn’t really leave the house for fear that the plague would sweep them up like a broom on a dusty attic floor. But enough imagery and foolery, the summer wasn’t that bad. Though we were all relating to the lyrics “Bored in the house, and I’m in the house bored,” the song that quite literally spelled out the entire year for us, the internet did its job: We were entertained by TikTok trends, Instagram Live videos, Netflix shows, and Hulu throwbacks, as we pretended there wasn’t an outside world we longed to be a part of. I was no different, let me tell you, gaming and watching TV was basically my whole summer break. I both read and watched the whole Harry Potter series, watched the whole Transformers, Marvel, and Star Wars series, and 9 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy (I’m sorry, this show is a waste of time). I have a home gym so I kinda, keyword kinda, kept in shape, or so I think I did, someone else is going to have to be the judge of that. And to top off all this positivity, that summer leading to the beginning of the new school year was when I discovered my newfound obsession with archery. It’s just been uphill ever since and I’d say I’m pretty good at it now. Don’t test me, though…seriously.

The pandemic had been going on for some time and everyone had to wear masks. As more time went on, it was becoming more so a routine. Having to social distance was such a simple task and wearing a mask felt like nothing. New vaccines for covid came out in Decemeber of 2020. There was much controversial over these because some people felt that they were unsafe because of how fast it was made.  In 2021, places were opening and said “no mask required”. To me, not wearing a mask in public felt very odd, so no matter where I went I still wore a mask. In this new year people were basically trying to forget that covid existed but it was still really bad throughout the whole world. This whole time hasn’t been that bad for me but it aldo wasn’t the most fun time. I hated doing online school(school through zoom at home because we couldn’t go back to school)and felt like it was useless and didn’t help at all. The best part was coming back to inperson school. I got to see my friends again and actually learn in a real helpful envirolnemt. The only catch was that we had to wear a mask the whole day. I think that going into the future by a few years, covid will still be a thing. Meaning that we are going to have to live with covid forever. Maybe people will stop wearing mask as a whole and just treat covid as a common sickness. Maybe people will learn to build a tolerance so it doesn’t effect us so badly.

Things got worse in the month of March. Life as we knew it took a gigantic turn. It was like we were living a different life compared to the one we had. Even though the world was turning upside down I never took the pandemic seriously. Until my mom stacked up on groceries. When I saw how much groceries she bought, I knew this was something serious. She also started buying multiple masks, hand sanitizers, and toilet paper. When she did that I knew this was real. Following this, things in school started to get serious. Everything started going downhill. It went from missing a week, to a month, to the whole year of no in-person schooling. We used a website called zoom to have class. It was never the same feeling of being in class in front of the teacher. One of the worst things about online classes is the way they run them. Cameras had to be on 24/7 and learning was way harder to understand. Teachers did less teaching and more lecturing which caused frustration in many ways. In addition, the school always gave false hope. They tell us that we’re going back to school in a few weeks but when that time comes they extend the date. The worst part about being quarantined is missing practice and playing in games. Baseball was the main part of my life in high school. My team and I made so many memories together and we never got to finish our good times. My teammates were some of the best friends that you could have. We shared so many laughs and story’s, but all that was all crushed by this pandemic. Although we all kept in contact with each other, it was never the same as seeing them on the field. Not only that, I lost some of my family to this pandemic. I have never been really close with my family, but we never forget to check up on each other. Seeing that I lost 2 of my family members to the coronavirus, really put me in a depression. This was one of the worst experiences in my life. The only way that I could cope with this continuous hardship is to play basketball and play video games. I mean there wasn’t a lot that I could do. Everything was closed and I couldn’t be around people like I was before. Being at home all day forced me to catch up on all the tv shows that I never thought I would watch. I might have watched almost every Netflix series and movie. This pandemic gave so much free time that it was too much.