The World Still Spins

There's still snow all over on the ground. It might be spring, but that doesn't mean that the weather's suddenly going to get with the program. I walk around, enjoying the strangeness of it all. It's so weird. Even though it's freezing-below freezing, actually-there's plenty of people in the park. People jog and walk their dogs, but it's the same no matter where you go. Nobody will go within six feet of each other. They wear a mask or a scarf for the most part, although some have left their faces exposed, noses and cheeks turning red in the cold.

It's almost a cruel theater of everything I have to worry about. The main reason for it being this cold and snowy is, besides the fact that the mountains to the west and desert to the east here makes for interesting times, is climate change. Warm air creates more storms like this, and irregular weather patterns. It was sunny, climbing up into the sixties yesterday. In my short, short lifetime, the planet has warmed up. The nature of existing in this time is that I've experienced temperatures in the hundreds, as well as those below freezing. This might be the last generation where you'll be able to do that. To endure the blistering summer in the city and still have 20 below zero (in Fahrenheit, mind you) in the mountains during the winter.

Oh, and there's a pandemic going on. That's the other thing. The masks, the six feet of distance, the fact that I haven't seen my friends in what feels like ages. When you're in high school, and your life is full of new things every week, three weeks is eternity. Everything is closed, and I'm sick of scrolling through the Internet and interacting with my family, so snowy park it is. I think about how this is a historical moment. Years from now, kids will ask me what it was like. And I will tell them that it was scary. We never knew what was going to come next. Grocery stores ran out of food from people stockpiling. A lot of people hoarded toilet paper. Schools closed for the rest of the year. You couldn't travel anywhere, and then you couldn't leave the house unless it was for groceries.

But mostly, I will finish with a shrug, it was boring. Nothing to do but sit at home. You could go to the park or go on a bike ride if the weather was nice.

The weather is not nice right now, but it's still sort of beautiful out here. The snow covers everything except the muddy paths, snowflakes floating through the air before coming to rest on the ground. There's the odd sight of new leaves on trees and bushes covered in snow, the green struggling to be seen under the heavy white. The snow makes me sad, because it reminds me of going skiing. All the resorts closed weeks ago. Yet families laugh with each other on the paths, a group of people try their hardest to play soccer on the slippery snow, and the street behind me is strangely quiet, maybe because of the snow and maybe because there's fewer cars on the roads.

It's sort of like somebody hit pause on the world. Let the politicians and investors figure out how to get everyone started again while little kids have a snowball fight in the park. Give us all some time with our worries, time to reflect and reconnect with our families. Like a little stay-at-home vacation that everyone gets to take. A vacation that is not without its concerns, not without checking the state websites for more case data and anxiously checking the news, but then again, no vacation is perfect, and this one is imperfect in so many ways that I almost feel guilty for enjoying it. People are dying, hospital workers are working long shifts with not enough supplies, and so many are unemployed.

It weighs heavy on my mind, but sometimes when I look out at the park full of people being happy despite everything, I think that it might all be alright in the end. We will recover, we will learn from this crisis, and everything will go back to normal. It'll be okay. Except I sort of know that it won't. Things will always be difficult, that's the nature of life. And I have so little power, in the grand scheme of things, to make things right.

I turn the corner, veering onto the snowy grass to keep my distance from a lady walking her dog. It sends all of the sadness back again, the fact that I can't ask to pet her dog or even make small talk about the weather. I can't even meet up with a friend, unless we want to try and hear each other over the wind from six feet away. I can't...there's so much I can't do. All I can do is keep putting one foot in front of another, walking the big loop on the park. Walk past the field where I had soccer practice as a little kid, walk by the football field, walk by the shuttered rec center and the pool. I wonder what would be happening there right now, if not for all this. I wonder if there is an alternate world where the virus never happened and I'm at school right now, trying to drill a lecture into my head as I make a joke to my friend next to me. I wonder where everyone in this park would be then. Would they be at work? At school? Having job interviews, and talent shows, and coffee with a friend?

Think about something else. There's no use in thinking about everything we could have. It's already gone. Maybe it will be back in a few months, but there's a part of me that knows that nothing will ever be the same after this. Of course, you can say that about something as simple as reading a book that makes you think, but this feels more colossal. It'll be like the first time you miss a day of school during the year. You're sick, or you had a doctor's appointment right in the middle of the day, or you just told your mom you couldn't do it today. And you rest, you sleep in until ten or so, and it's a nice day. It feels good to take that day off, even as you do your homework and pick on your sister.

But then you go back to school, and maybe it's the growing sense of anxiety that comes with being a teenager, but you've missed something. Not something crucial, but something. It's never going to be quite the same as yesterday, when you'd been there for everything. People have had conversations you were never there for. Maybe your friends missed you. You definitely missed some work. It'll go back to normal, but you'll never feel quite as in-sync with your friends or your classes after.

Maybe that experience is just mine. I press the button to cross the street with my glove and quell the thoughts about how diseases are usually spread on public surfaces. But I have to wonder, is that what the rest of life is going to feel like for us? Like we missed a piece of it, and we'll never get the whole thing back again. Or will it all be okay in the end?

I cross the street, heading home. I don't know. I just feel like it'll be a long time before I find out.