I had skipped a fun event with the Columbia University Sailing Team and a show that I was going to see with a friend for this exam. Studying in Butler Ref, I was stressed for the exam coming up in two days. Ping! I get a text asking if I want to study with a friend, because no one understands what is on this test. Amidst all of this triviality, in the background, coronavirus lingered miles across the world, or so I thought. Travel was technological these days, advanced, fast. The first case had appeared in New York City, but I wasn’t worried. I was in my bubble of Barnard where no one had it. It was fine. 2 hours later: Checking my email like I do constantly, there’s a long email from President Beilock, and I receive several Slack, iMessage, and WhatsApp texts. Messages also travel fast, they spread like a virus, like news media. What a horrible analogy. It hits me, I can stop studying, I can close my books and I can go back to my dorm. There’s definitely no exam. I can pack my things and go home. Yet, I thought it was all temporary. I didn’t think there was no school. We would all be back in a couple weeks, of course. It’s 2020, this isn’t the bubonic plague era. What I forgot to remind myself, was that humans are not the top of the food chain like we think we are, or like we enjoy telling ourselves. We are not in control, and a microscopic virus is. Pack your bags. That’s what they say in the movies when the child is being set home from summer camp for “being bad” or expelled from boarding school. Everything would be fine. We wouldn’t die, it’s the United States. It’s the greatest country in the world. We’re invincible. Nothing can take us down. I usually buy cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery to bring home, but my mother said not to touch anything and to just come directly home. I wore a surgical mask that I took from primary care, on the subway to Penn Station. I bought Lysol wipes from Morton Williams. I said goodbye to my roommates whose parents booked them last minute plane tickets, and my roommate of East Asian descent is getting racist comments thrown at her from New Yorkers. How disgusting. Little did I know it would be the last time we dormed together. This was all still a joke. It’s now COVID-19, and I felt wrong to say “coronavirus.” Just a few days after being home, with my friends scattered all over from staying at Barnard to flying back home in Nairobi, Kenya, I get the email that we are online for the rest of the semester. I’ll miss my friends and campus events, but it hadn’t set in. The next morning, I’m in the car with my family, on my way to New York City, to move-out, to see others moving out, to say goodbye to my friend, Talia, through an elbow touch instead of a hug, which we laughed about. There was so much left undone for the rest of the semester. There was so much unsaid. Don’t touch anything, I tell my parents, knowing New York City has it the worst right now. I want my housing refund. School’s online now. It’s almost, dare I say it, convenient. However, my relationship with this quarantine is a sine curve knowing that my classmates have hundreds of different situations that they are facing. I feel helpless, looking out the window while staying inside my home, I can only imagine the chaos in hospitals and erupting around the world while many lose their jobs and family and friends. I keep emailing the hospitals I’ve worked with before, Albany Medical Hospital, Mt. Sinai, and one by one offering to tutor healthcare workers’ children, but that’s the only thing I can do while staying home, which is the more important thing to do. I type these sentences in such a length knowing the drag of not being able to help despite trying to. As a natural optimist, I am appreciative of the time I can spend with my family, who is also home, but knowing that others don’t have the opportunity to be so positive. They are delivery persons, they are hospital workers, they are police officers, they are humans. These thoughts run through my mind, and then, I resume my next class on Zoom. I sit with my sister on the couch and we go through the memes in our respective college’s Facebook groups. The only way to get through a pandemic is to meme it and socialize with family and Facetime your few close friends. Internships canceled, graduations postponed, and my friend’s MCAT exam canceled so she has to take a gap year before medical school. What a luxury to call these our problems. I can only be grateful, because it seems a bitter crime to complain. Onto baking my next batch of cookies and learning a TikTok dance like the basic human I am. The hospital coordinators get back to me saying there isn’t a huge need, at this point I’ve reached out to my library’s homework helpers program as well, because how can children at their most impressionable time be learning math and reading in 3rd grade while online with parents of various education levels? How? It all runs through my head, but I still retain my air of positivity. There is so much negativity on the news, of course, but if it’s out of your control, let it go. There’s always lux in the world too, like people coming together to help, like teachers coming to students, standing six feet away outside their homes, to explain fractions to their 3th grade students. My job this summer is to make sure I better myself, for when my time comes to fight. My sister and I spend the days eating the banana bread she made and watching Family Karma, a reality show that jostles our laughter out of us. It’s now Ramadan, so it’s no TV, more time to spend with family, and more time to spend on religion while finishing up with school. Instead of heading to the mosque every night of Ramadan, we are home, distanced, but not spiritually or relationships-wise. I find myself putting in the same work for school, just scheduling things on my own time (waking up between 9AM and 11AM EST), however, it takes isolating myself in my bedroom to focus. I enjoy Facetimes with friends, the virtual club meetings, scheduled in eastern time because time zone is a key component of scheduling now, and hearing how everyone is doing. A girl in my small seminar-style Spanish class has the virus, and so does her entire family, but they are okay. Another girl in that same Spanish class, caught the virus, and is in the hospital, but very stable. Another guy in that class is in Texas, while his wife is in New York City helping as a volunteer nurse. I can only imagine his stress, but he’s here on Zoom in class. There are deaths in the communities I am a part of. It’s shocking that this is occurring to my classmates, my professors, families, and friends. They are the statistics I see on TV. I just have to keep thinking, everything is, and will be, fine. The economy is worse than 2008. Small businesses are putting up boards and saying goodbye. This isn’t goodbye, the world always rises once again. Spanish flu, the Great Depression, and through world wars we rise. I choose to document my feelings throughout this, as a privileged young woman and student in upstate New York, just far enough but just close enough to the chaos occuring in a place I call home, because one may forget what happened, what they were doing, but they will always remember the feelings. If historians need to know what was happening they can read the newspapers and social media, but if they want to know how average Americans were doing, they can read this. Let us never repeat history, and the only way to not let a pandemic overtake us again, is to have the buildup of strength in every way, politically, physically, economically, mentally, technologically, medically, and with strength in numbers. I sit here, and I do my practice exams for my online exam, keep having my tutoring sessions for chemistry with a Barnard peer tutor over Google Meeting, and I take the exam continuing my Barnard education, because knowledge is power, and one day it’ll be our generation needing the power to fight. When I’m home I just want to hang out with my family in the living room. Even having gone to public school in my hometown, I still quickly associated being home with school break as a first-year. This emphasis on family time during quarantine is recurrent, as taking advantage of this time if you can’t help in the field is important knowing there may not ever be this much time. My friend and I text about my to-do list of skills to learn and strengthen. So many things. So many. Learn a language, learn to sketch, read what you’ve been putting off because you didn’t have time, better your driving now that the roads are open, learn a programming language or statistical application, make a website with COVID-19 resources and spread the campaign on social media. I could go on. This is all I can do, because I can’t look at the images of those suffering when it’s not in my hands. Better yourself for when your time comes. The time to do so is now. The time is here.