Our lives have profoundly changed. The covid pandemic is shaping a new world around us, which we are inevitably forced to adapt to. From school to social life, to holidays, traveling, sharing a meal and simply walking down the street, we are all asked to change our usual routines in order to create a safe environment for everyone. It is not easy of course: not only adults but also children and us teenagers have to keep in mind how many dangers surround us.
Every morning around 5 million students have to wake up and use their computers to attend classes, something that we would have never imagined could happen at our old-fashioned schools. And they have to keep an eye on their brothers or sisters, their essential coffee on the burner, since the quiet place such as a school should be, couldn’t be more different than the situation we experience every day at our houses. Losing the conscience of time, forgetting what day it is, it all seems to be part of this inevitably new routine. In the morning we wake up (precisely at the start of our classes, usually) to listen to lessons of teachers that are at least as bored and annoyed as we are, properly hidden behind our initials, or our profile pictures, and still wearing our pajamas. We eat not knowing what time it is, stuffing our faces to fill the emptiness of the outside world that we miss so much. We then lay bored on our beds or sofas, again in front of a screen on which Netflix should keep us distracted, mostly (at least personally) thinking about what we possibly could have done wrong in our life to deserve a pandemic that stops us from being young, wild and free. We then study, hardly breathing some pure air if we manage to take a stroll outside.
The situation has of course gotten better, yet we still feel lost. We miss those little things we have always taken for granted, we miss the aspects of life we had never focused on. There seems to be no end, even more after the apparent freedom we were allowed last summer. We took a taste of it and then lost it all over again. Yet, we want to have hope, we need to keep it. Better days will come for sure, we just have to be patient and wait for them, not going crazy because of the deep loneliness we sense around us. If we may not be all on the same boat (it has to be said that some people are going through this in a better way, at least economically speaking), we certainly are under the same storm, from which we can surely raise, mature and learn to appreciate more the importance of ordinary and “common” situations and privileges. Stay strong, ask for help, don’t isolate yourself. You can’t change the issue, but you can definitely do something about your approach to it.
Meanwhile, we can’t help taking a glance at the sky outside, thinking of when this will all end, hoping to wake up soon from a bad dream that is what reality is now.
