THE PANDEMIC

I have absolutely no idea how the film making industry works but if they wanted to make a movie or write a

play about a starless sky,today would be the best night to film it. There’s just but a handful of stars that dared to show up tonight. I could probably count them all. The astronomer would probably have a scientific explanation for this phenomenon but mine are a couple of superstitious hypotheses.

Remember Gru?The guy with the long nose and skinny legs who stole the moon in the first season of "Despicable me"?Maybe he remembered to come back and steal the stars as well. Or maybe,this starless sky is symbolic of the dark times we are living in. Maybe even the cosmos is mourning the hundreds of thousands of lives lost,the thousands of families separated,the millions of jobs lost and the countless

number of people in pain.

Another hypothesis would be that this is what astrophysicists call a parallel universe,only with a few minor details altered. Maybe in our real earth, the sky is full of stars and the moon is still as bright. Perhaps in our real

earth, news anchors and journalists are not reporting statistics of how many new cases there are or how

many lives have been cut short. Maybe in our real earth no one had to receive a letter from their boss explaining in three sentences how unfortunate it is that they had to be let go. Maybe back home, kids are still excited to get up in the morning to

rush to school so that they can see their friends. Maybe in the real world people are not locked up in their

houses with no idea how to get their next meal. Maybe,just maybe,depression is not slowly taking root in our real world.

How I wish all these bizarre hypotheses were true because it’s hard to believe that six months ago I was

getting ready to go to hospital for my internship. Six months ago I got a tailor made lab coat with my name printed on it in bold ready to chase my dreams. Six months ago I was excited to get up at 4:00 a.m. every morning and

head directly to the pediatric ward of my hospital and take care of those tiny little humans. It’s hard to

believe that the we all had to change our way of life in a matter of months. Talk about lightning speed evolution! I used to believe that this kind of

thing only happens in movies. Well I guess there's always a first time to be wrong.

Before all this happened, before all this absurdity and madness, I was fascinated by just but a few things. I loved(and still love) neuroanatomy,

neurophysiology and everything neuroscience. I found it fascinating trying to comprehend how the human

body works but even more intriguing for me was finding out how the human mind works. What makes people

do the things they do?What makes people make the decisions they make?What makes people feel the way

they do?

I'll let you in on a little scientific fact. In our brain, sitting just anterior to our hippocampus is a little almond

shaped structure. We call it the amygdala. It’s so small -takes up only about 2.3 cubic centimeters in volume. Anatomists say that it occupies less than 0.4% of the total brain volume. It’s supposed to control our emotions;fear,anger and a few happy emotions. For such a tiny structure,it sure does have a lot of power.

I don't like admitting it but over the past few months my amygdalas have been pretty overworked and grossly underpaid. Fear has become my new normal state. Why? Never in my life have I had to experience this much loss. Never in my life did I for a second think that I'd have to watch people I love live from hand to mouth because they got laid off at work. Never in my life have I ever felt so far from getting to my dreams. Sometimes I'm afraid that Ill be one of those negative statistics that they read out every day. Some nights when I'm lucky, the nightmares don't come but I still have to deal with the insomnia. So I do all they ask- I stay locked up at home, I wash my hands so much I just might get blisters and I can't remember the last time I saw the road.

When I was a kid my mum told me that if I was ever afraid, all I had to do was close my eyes and ask God to take away the fear. So I often pray for the world and in my prayers I ask God to take things back to how they were, if not better. I ask Him to forgive us if we've done anything wrong. He's silent, I know and I don't know why but whether that is proof of his existence or non-existence is something I also don't know. I chose to be optimistic though so I hope He hears me and that all this ends soon.

I just realized that I'm doing that thing that my therapist always says I do. Overgeneralization, I think that's what he calls it. Says it's when I make sweeping conclusions based on a single event. Maybe tonight the sky is starless just because the earth is rotating about its axis. Maybe a black sky doesn't have to symbolize the end of mankind. Oh wait! There's a star I hadn't seen before. It seems to shine brighter than the rest. I've got a couple of superstitious hypotheses about this too but I don't want to prove my therapist right.