10 Months of Quarantine
Everything is weird. There is nothing else to say. That’s all. That’s how it is. I have been lockdown in my apartment for 10 months, exactly 10 months have passed since it all started. It was an ordinary day, an ordinary and calm Sunday. I remember that my mom has received an email from my school stating that only for this week we were having virtual classes. Hmmm, that was what we thought, that was what we all believed. Everyone was relieved and excited, we were having a week of vacation because let’s be real, anyone was going to pay attention to any lecture while being at home. However, this is not how things ended up occurring. As we all know, Colombia went through a phase of lockdown and quarantine due to COVID 19.
Anyone realized the seriousness of the situation, or at least not me. It was about 4 months, more or less, which took me to understand what was happening. At first, I thought that this virus was just a flu, that it was nothing, but I was wrong. Unfortunately, I realized this by hearing how family and friends died thanks to this ‘harmless flu’. I started to get frighten, a lot. I remember how sometimes I would look out onto the balcony and not see a single car pass through the busy street that my block used to be. I was confused, I was lost. I had never seen the roads so lonely, so desolate. I thought that nothing would be the same again. I believed that cars would no longer pass through the streets, never agian. Quite exaggerated, I know. However, things supposedly started to improve. When they lifted the mandatory quarantine, everything, or well almost everything, returned to normal. Clearly, things weren’t the same as before, but my normality had returned, there were already people on the street and cars on the roads.
My mom was, and she still is, one of the few lucky people who still work from home. This has made life a lot easier to be honest. She has been quite freaked out by the virus issue thanks to various reasons. I do not want to extend myself, so I will summarize the two most important motives: first, I live with my grandparents and second, both my mother and my grandparents suffer from various preexistences. If she had to go out to work this would be chaos. For these reasons I have not exited my home in 10 months. Incredible, I know. Although, to be honest, it’s not that I haven’t leave my home at all. The truth is that I lasted 7 months without leaving my appartment. When we were already going through the seventh month without leaving, my mother realized that this was not good for my mental health. For this reason, we decided to start walking on Sundays, and for 3 months those have been my only outings.
It is incredible how time has passed by so fast, incredibly fast. I need my friends, the old days, contact with people … but hey, we are getting vaccinated soon right? I hope this fixes the situation or at least improves it a bit.
