a memory
This past year has been an interesting one. From when I stopped working in March through mid-May when I started working away, I did not see a single person outside of my family, besides my neighbors from a very far distance when I was walking my dogs. My mother is a nurse at the HUP (the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania) and was on the first COVID-19 floor, so I had to remain in full isolation for a while.
Because of this isolation, I remember the last shift I worked very clearly, as it was the last time I went anywhere to do anything for two months essentially. It was about a week after in-person classes had been suspended, and I was in high school, so work was the only time I was able to get out of my house. I worked at Wawa, and they paid me really well and I liked my coworkers, so I actually enjoyed working.
It was a pretty normal Thursday night, except for the fact that we barely had any customers. I was working with my favorite manager and coworker (Shane and Cami, who are both awesome people), so it was a fun night to be at work. This was just before masks had really become a prevalent thing for the public, so we hadn’t started wearing them yet at work. I was texting my parents throughout my shift because I was just at the cash register that night and there wasn’t much to do in the store. It was around 9 pm that they told me that I wouldn’t be allowed to work for the foreseeable future. I was really sad because that’s when the reality of the lockdown set in for me. At that moment, I knew that it would be a very long time until things “went back to normal.”
That was my moment of realization that the quarantine would last longer than just a few weeks. It marked a time when I had to fully change my mindset and adapt my way of living to a more solitary lifestyle. As a theatre maker and someone who enjoys being around other people all the time, this moment marked a hard shift in the way that I would have to go about my everyday life, and has affected me greatly to this day.
I told my boss that my parents didn’t want me to come into work anymore and was pretty distraught about it, but he understood and said that he’d leave a note for the store manager. I finished out my shift that night like normal, and then I said goodbye to my coworkers, knowing that it’d be the last time I saw them (or anyone besides my family, for that matter) for a long time.
I got in my car and started the short 7-minute drive home. But on my drive, I realized that I really didn’t want to go home yet, so I drove around my small suburban town for about an hour just listening to music and thinking.
I played that playlist, titled “ahhh” (which at the time did not have the last 2 songs on it) on shuffle and listened to the majority of it. When I pulled into my street and parked my car, the song “we found two dead swans and filled their bodies with flowers” by Teen Suicide came on, and I just sat in my car thinking about how things would be from that point on because of the pandemic while that played in the background. I guess that’s my song of the week for this week, even though it’s not much of a throwback (it’s number 26 on the playlist). That marked the real beginning of isolation for me.
That was over a year ago, and if you told me I’d be here at Temple doing the majority of my classes virtually over a year later, I might’ve actually believed you after the realization I had that night. But, I also might’ve called you crazy because it’s hard to determine how our past selves would react to our present reality. Either way, it’s been over a year since that night, and I still remember that initial feeling of “oh sh!t, this quarantine is probably gonna last a while” very vividly.
This was a weird one, so thanks for reading my blog today, I hoped you enjoyed it!