The Dog Days of Quarantine
Published May 13, 2020
It's almost a trick of youth, I think, to be going through a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic and be able to maintain a relatively calm state of mind. It's the fact that I already had two unstable feet in early adulthood walking straight down the path of uncertainty and that being in my fourth city in four years has made me an expert in starting over. Mostly, it's the fact that I'm still naive enough to believe in my own steadfast resilience.
I had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with COVID-19 in what was to become one of the worst hot spots in the world. I had worked unpaid internships and hustled at service industry jobs until I finally acquired the means, the experience, and the balls to resurrect a seven-year-old dream of moving to New York City. After shedding a few tears of frustration in the most public of places, I finally landed a job that I was proud of and signed for an apartment that I love. It only took a few more months for Coronavirus to waltz in and disrupt all of my hard work in what someone described to me as, "jumping head first into the deep end just to have someone pull the drain."
I gave myself one week after the city-wide shutdown before I decided to join the rest of New York and make a run for it. I caught a flight back to California for eighty degrees poolside, home-cooked meals, and most of all, fresh air and personal space. After two weeks I was laid off but the weather was warming. New York Times alerts buzzed onto my home screen as I was deep in a haze of nostalgia for a childhood spent on the river banks. The talk of extended shelter-in-place was ultimately drowned out by the old records my mom and I listened to while we talked about life and I justified the monthly bills on an empty apartment with the amount I was saving on groceries and sanity. With bare feet and bronzed skin I sat on my porch and comfortably sipped coffee until I lost track of how many times the sun had fallen and risen again in a blaring white light of false comfort. I let myself slip into a bubble of fictive summer vacation where the only thing ripping me out was the morning news until I was sedated again by card games and fire pit conversations.
But as nice as my bubble has been, it burst the second I got word of an end date for quarantine and made me realize why I’ve clung on to denial so hard. The world is not elastic. We won’t snap back to how things used to be when we’re allowed to go back into it again. The concert tickets I purchased pre-pandemic won’t be put to use any time soon. There will be no Broadway shows or exhibits at the MoMA or rooftop bars in Brooklyn. The New York I return to will not be the New York I so fondly remember and all of the grit, glamour, and unlimited possibilities that it has to offer will still linger on the horizon while its residents sit on their fire escapes and wait for what used to be.
But as we all mourn the loss of normalcy, we’ve found a lot of good in the wreckage. We’re rekindling relationships and rediscovering the importance of communication and community. We’re pushing ourselves past our creative limits or finally taking time for ourselves to sit still and reflect. Most importantly, we’re doing these things with the knowledge that everyone else in the world is too. I'm not sure what lies ahead, but I'm grateful for the dog days of quarantine that reminded me what it's like to have time that is only mine to fill and that mindless conversation and easy sips of Coors with my family can feed my soul just as much as a milestone in my career would. There are plenty more changes left to overcome in life, and I hope the lessons of this pandemic stay with me through them all.
