Covid’s never gonna come here

An incident occurred at the beginning of last year when the pandemic hadn’t hit us yet and school was still in session. I was walking in the hallway with two of my friends when one of them stopped to ask our principal what precautions our school would take if Covid-19 did come to India.

“Ha!” My other friend snorted, shaking her head. “Covid is never gonna come here. China is, like, a million miles away.”

Not quite.

Two months later, the entire country was in lockdown, and even after more than a year we still haven’t escaped the restrictions of this pandemic. See, I thought bitterly (with a touch of spite as well), this is why you dropped geography.

Since then, I’ve grown considerably less pessimistic, which I think is for the best. When this first started, I admit it threw us all for a loop. As the number of cases grew, all schools and public places were shut down for safety. This was good news at first. My classmates and I were excited at the prospect of not having to go to school in person, and online classes were a new and foreign thing we saw as a novelty. And it was fun for a while. But we started getting restless. Having lockdown periods off and on, not being able to step out, with even vehicle movement restricted, we felt cooped up and suffocated.

Online classes didn’t make things easier. In fact, they did the exact opposite. I took it too easy and didn’t focus on lessons, thinking that lockdown would be lifted soon and we’d be back to school in no time. But months went by, cases only rose, the chance of getting infected only increased. I became lazy and unmotivated, not wanting to put any effort into any of my lessons. My head hurt staring at my laptop screen the whole day and submitting my homework much after the due date became the norm. It was difficult to shake myself out of this slump, and at the rate, it was going I wasn’t sure I even wanted to in the first place.

But I’m glad to say that I’ve long since left that part of me behind. I’ve managed to find a rhythm for myself, where I balance schoolwork and studies and free time without crushing myself mentally. This new routine is working wonders for my time management (and I think my parents are also glad I’m not spending all my time on my phone).

I have been keeping busy painting and doing embroidery, although I’m not very good at it - I’ve pricked myself so many times you’d think I’d have fallen hands-first on a hedgehog. My old Kindle also made its way out of the depths of my dusty drawers. I have fallen in love with the fantasy genre all over again; it seems to be all I read these days. The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss, and Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett are just a few books I greatly enjoyed.

There seems to be a lot of time left over even with all these other activities I’m engaged in, so I do what any sane human being in my situation would do - I kick back and watch TV. So far, I’ve seen a shockingly high number of short anime, rewatched the Ocean’s 11 movies so many times my friends had to beg me to talk about something else, made it halfway through the eighteen available seasons of NCIS, and am slowly but surely chipping away at Netflix’s selection of kung-fu movies with my dad. Hey, at least that counts as family bonding, right?

It wasn’t easy at first. It still isn’t. We were all unprepared for something of this magnitude to flip our lives completely upside down, and not a day passes where I don’t think how grateful I am that I haven’t lost anyone close to me. All we can do at this moment is hope for the best, keep our eyes ahead, not think about the “what-ifs” and “what-could’ve-beens”. It will take time to recover, but we eventually will, and soon this nightmarish incident will seem a million miles behind us.

(Maybe don’t take my word for that. I dropped geography too.)