Every morning I wake up and my mind is empty. This is a feeling I am not used to. When I had to go to school, the morning was a time when my mind would be busy with thoughts about things that the teachers would show us in class, who would go to school, and what might happen after school.

I no longer have to think about school and every morning my mind is like a desert with tumbleweeds. As a result of this, life feels much more disorganized and chaotic. It is weird to wake up and not know what you’re going to do for the day, or who you’re going to talk to.

I remember one afternoon I took a break from doing my homework. I sat in my dimly lit room on my computer chair, the computer screen light filled up the room with the light that was missing. I sat with my back slouched against the chair looking at the space between the window and the beige colored curtain. I began to wonder, is this what my life would look like after college?

Furthermore, throughout this time I have also realized that I have taken a lot of things for granted. After the second week of not going to school I realized that I took for granted my ability to physically see my friends and talk to them face to face instead of through pixels on a screen.

The first week of not going to school I thought it would be enough to just hear their voices or text them, but that wasn’t the case. I never thought that it would be a necessity for me to see my friends physically in order to feel close to them.
As a result of this, I wondered why I felt the need to see my friends. I came to the conclusion that maybe I need to physically see them because I can see their facial expressions when we have conversations, and maybe I feel less lonely when someone is physically there to have a conversation with me.

Additionally, in this quarantine I have also realized that the people in our society have become placid. We have become so used to hearing bad news and seeing tragic things happen that we no longer get surprised by what we are being told on the news and internet. For example, my oldest sister studied to be a journalist so it is in her nature to look at the news and report back to my mom anything new that has happened.

One afternoon my mom and I were sitting in the living room watching a show about wedding dresses. I got distracted from the television as soon as I heard my oldest sisters heavy footsteps from the other side of the house. By that sound I already knew that she was scurrying to get to my mom and tell her the news. My sister quickly opened the heavy glass door with her phone in her hand and sat next to my mom and told her the news.

That afternoon my sister told my mom that three hundred and fifty six people had already died from the virus in Massachusetts. My mom turned her head to my sister and said that it wasn’t a lot of people. As soon as she said that I gave her a weird look because I was confused as to why she was so calm about it. I understand that once a person hears the high amounts of deaths that there have been everyday, they eventually find it normal and get used to it, I am also guilty of that.

But there is another side of me that thinks, “wow that’s a lot of people. They had families, they had coworkers and friends, they may not have had the chance to do something that they wanted to do. They had lives.”. As soon as I think about that I get worried for the other bigger amounts of people that have yet to die from the virus. I think about how they may be feeling. Sometimes I wonder if they had any regrets or wishes.

Lastly, this whole experience has taught me that life is short. Life is very, very short. I am not trying to sound pessimistic, but we do have to realize that we can die at any moment and time. We are not immortal.

I know that life gets in the way of us accomplishing our wishes. I know that we have been taught since we were smaller that we have to work and our number one wish should be to get a good job that pays a reasonable amount of money to live comfortably. We work and keep on working in order to keep that wish that was granted or to achieve that wish.

But that all gets in the way of us figuring out what our real wishes are. I understand that we all want to be successful or to keep being successful when it comes to job and career achievements. But we also have to do things that make us happy so that when the time comes for us to die we don’t regret only accomplishing getting a good job and making money.

Editor’s Note: Priscilla is a Lawrence High School Early College student. She wrote this for an English Comp 102 class and shared it with the NECC Observer.