Buried by the Mind

She was tired. That's what it was, what Ava chalked it up to. She had never experienced anything like this before. No one had. That's why the world had been full of fear a year ago. She had read about it, read about the quarantines of the past, but she'd never thought she was going to end up in a situation where she was in it, where every day bled into the next and the only reason she knew what day it was was because of her laptop and phone. Even still she was constantly getting her days confused, waking up early, waking up late, forgetting to set her alarm for meetings. She wanted to scream with the frustration of it all.

Ava had had so many plans for this year, so many things she hadn't been able to do that she'd been looking forward to. She felt bleary, like she was recovering from a cold, but aside from seasonal allergies she hadn't suffered from anything in a year. She ran her hands through her tangle of light brown hair and threw it up in a ponytail. If she wasn't going to get anything done, there wasn't a point to staying inside. She was going on a run.

She went upstairs and put on a pair of leggings, a tank top and a hooded long sleeve shirt. She grabbed her phone from the bedside table and realized it was two hours earlier than she thought. She shook her head and walked downstairs. Her sense of time was off as well. She put on her running shoes and headed out the door.

The last time she had run before the pandemic closed everything was perfectly normal. People were out on the streets getting exercise or running errands before starting their days. She ran before going to work. When she got back, she packed her bag and left. Even with the beginnings of the pandemic she'd started being careful, washing her hands, but she wasn't wearing a mask - yet. She wasn't isolating - yet. She hadn't changed much of anything. She had had meetings, had talked to her colleagues. It had been a busy week and the last thing they were talking about was the disease that was about to change everything they had known, everything they had planned.

Ava wasn't sure what she'd thought about on that final run before lockdown. Something small and insignificant a year later probably. A meeting for work or drinks with a friend that had happened over Zoom instead of in the office or a pub.

She wasn't even sure if anything she was doing now was going to make a difference in the long run. Was anything going to be the same in a year? It didn't seem like it. It felt like everything was constantly changing, and while most of it was for the better, she felt like everything was dissolving around her as soon as she got used to it.

Nothing was going to be the same anymore. It was going to be something that was constantly lingering and it was going to stay that way because no matter how close she was getting to being able to get a vaccine, everything had changed for good and somewhere in the back of her mind she wanted everything to go back the way it was and take the trip to Amsterdam she'd been planning for years, only to have it pulled away from her.

Those first weeks she'd been angry. Angry at whatever and whoever had caused the disease to have such a massive impact on the world. She wanted to take the trip she'd been planning for years, not have it taken away from her. She wanted to throw a fit, but knew it wouldn't change anything. She still wasn't going to be allowed into the Netherlands.

She threw her mother's favourite ceramic dish at a wall and watched it shatter.

Later she'd regretted it. Regretted throwing the dish at the wall. Regretted her reaction because it hadn't changed anything.

Regretted not telling her mother and being grateful she could keep it hidden. Her mother wasn't going to be allowed in her apartment for months.

She had felt horrible after. She had felt out of control for days, had hidden it from her colleagues and all the friends who were texting her, checking in, seeing how she was doing. She didn't tell any of them the truth. That she panicked whenever she thought about it.

It had taken a long while to get everything sorted. When she finally emerged from the hole she'd dug herself in, her friends had welcomed her into their Zoom calls and text feeds with no questions asked. She was grateful for the way they'd reacted. She hadn't been sure if they were going to ask questions and pester her with what they thought were reasonable things to ask.

She still felt guilty every time she talked to her mother. She didn't know what her mother was going to say when the dish wasn't on the counter as a fruit bowl, the way it had been since Ava had moved in. Ava knew her mother was going to question it, was going to badger her about it the way her friends hadn't. She didn't want to deal with it, so Ava hadn't told her about the way the shards of pottery had cut her fingers and the way she had tried to stop the tears as she cleaned up the blood and talked to her boyfriend on the phone.

Every time she thought about the year, Ava could feel the panic bubbling up inside her. She wished she could be one of the people who was unbothered by it, but she wasn't. The panic was always there, always lurking. It came to the surface on Zoom meetings and calls with her friends and boyfriend.

They understood when she hung up in the middle of a sentence.

She ran to forget, to not have to think, to push this panic aside. She ran with a podcast playing so she could focus on history, not on the history that was being made around her.