By Nina Joss
April 13
I watch the news and they talk about things starting to calm down, the deaths in NYC are less than 700 per day now. My first reaction is rather perverse. To be honest, it is a, “No! Don’t tell us we’re not gonna have another snow day, that the storm is almost passed over us!” feeling. That sounds terrible and I’m not sure how to explain it. I think it’s just the side of me, the side of an eternally busy person, who has really enjoyed this forced relaxation. I don’t want this disaster to continue, but I will miss the beautiful simplicity of quarantine.
But then I realize—holy frick, it still hasn’t passed over us. We’ve been here for how long? A month now? Long enough that I had a Leadership midterm right before spring break and now the final is next week. This should be over by now.
Yes, the numbers are plateauing, it’s maybe gonna get better “soon,” they talk of turning the nozzle of normal life slowly on again. But we are still in this. These are predictions, estimates, hopes. We could be here a LOT longer.
And the next part is gonna be confusing, too. What does turning the nozzle on “slowly” look like in a world dying to be on full blast again? A world of people who can’t wait to move and hug?
This might be getting better, but it’s not even close to over. Our normal lives really might be a thing of the past, in some ways.
Also, there were tornadoes yesterday in Louisiana, Tennessee and New Jersey. Watching the news usually makes the world look like it’s going to sh*t. But these days? It really makes it look like it’s ending.
April 5
My family drove to my grandparents’ house, about an hour away, to dance in their yard and entertain them today. Coming home afterward felt like coming home from a vacation because those 5 hours were the longest we had left the house in weeks. The culture shock after this is going to be so weird. It’s crazy how this whole stay-at-home situation feels so different—almost normal—now, compared to how shocked and in denial we were when we couldn’t hug at first.
April 21
It’s so weird that this thing we’re living right now is going to likely truly affect the rest of our lives, especially economically. That this has become almost normality now, being at home, all of this stage new life, people dying every day. It feels normal. That’s crazy.
But it feels normal the way Christmas break feels normal, like it will end sometime and real life will resume. Just a little break from reality.
But I just read an article with a quote: “I don’t think the New York we left will be back for some years. I don’t know if we’ll ever get it back.”
To think that that New York City might be gone forever. The little me who dreamed of one day living in that magical place might never do it. Movies set in New York City will reflect a place that is gone, in the past, like movies about the Roman civilization.
That’s a bizarre thing to think. That even when this winter break part is over, what we are living now might really affect the way we live, think, exist in the world.
If you had told the little Nina back then that when she turned 21 the world would be hit by a pandemic, killing thousands and shutting down places she knew and dreamed of, she would have been afraid. Now that it’s normal, it seems less scary. It just is. But as it goes on, I think we’ll realize more and more how insane this is, like I have over the course of the past month and a half.
Or maybe we won’t. Maybe it will stay normal, stay reality, hitting us with shock every now and then and then returning to normal–because once this is the case for a while, it will be.
It’s strange how reality can become history and the present can become normality so quickly.