Do I Wanna Know?
Today, I went penny boarding in the park. I fell a few times, skinned my left palm, and was laughed at by a little boy, but it was nice to feel like the world was normal again, even if it was for only a few hours. The sky’s still blue, the birds still sing in the morning, and the trash pickup truck comes every day around 5 AM.
It’s already been a month of quarantine. I tried to be optimistic during most of it. Everyone around me was freaking out, saying that the world was ending and that Jesus was coming back. I tried to convince myself that quarantine would be over before I knew it, but halfway through, I think I started going a little crazy. It was hard to stay in my room the entire day, especially at night. It felt like the walls were slowly closing up on me.
LAUSD either lied to us or grossly underestimated how serious and global COVID-19 was going to be. They said we’d be back in school in two weeks. As if the virus hadn’t killed millions of people already. I feel like the United States could have responded faster to the coronavirus and optimized the warnings we saw internationally. We knew what was happening in China, in Korea, in Italy; we knew what would happen once it reached the United States and how bad it could get.
I miss social interaction. I miss how simple it used to be to go to the grocery store to buy snacks, how easy it was to go to the Grove after school and hang out with my friends, or how you didn’t have to wash your hands obsessively after any human contact. I remember going on late night drives with my friends all the time; we’d walk along the beach and have deep talks as we stared out into the black, murky water. We weren’t worried about contracting a disease that could kill us and all of our families.
I started playing the piano more. I used to hate it when I was younger because I couldn’t sit still for two hours straight and I hated how the songs sounded whenever I played the wrong keys. It’s ironic that I enjoy it very much now, to the point that I’m learning new songs every day. I’ve found that I like to play heart wrenching pieces. I stay away from happy butter yellow pieces that remind you of sunshine, grass meadows, and picnics. I like to play eerie burgundy songs that make you want to cry in an ice freezer. My favorite song to play is ‘Victor’s Piano Solo’ from Corpse Bride because of its quickening tempo and loud buildup.
Social distancing has taught me more than I would like to know. Life changes in an instant — its unpredictability is something that we will never learn to adjust to. We have no control over our lives. It is our greatest weakness. It is our human arrogance. We are governed by science and higher powers, no matter how fiercely we try to believe otherwise. We explain and think and wonder and establish lines of reasoning in desperate attempts for an essence of control in our lives. We did not choose to breathe oxygen, we did not choose our necessities like sleep and nutrition, we did not create our fragile, ephemeral bodies. We did not choose to die. We did not choose to live.
Even though our lives have been put on pause, there’s still a lot of work to be done. I feel a little overwhelmed sometimes. It seems like even if I finish one thing, I have a hundred more things to do. But I guess it’s better to feel overwhelmed than to feel like you have nothing to do. I’d rather be writing a research paper than spending my day on my phone.