Coronavirus Diaries is a series of diary-type entries written by students and staff documenting the day to day activities and experiences in quarantine. If you are interested in submitting an entry, contact us at [email protected] 

The coronavirus has canceled the world, and a lot of the things I was looking forward to doing and achieving are gone. Many plans with my friends and family and soccer tournaments that my team and I worked extremely hard to qualify for are just a few examples of the things that were supposed to happen this summer, but a guy in Wuhan decided to eat a bat. 

At first, I thought that the coronavirus wouldn’t affect America as much as it has. I thought that all the chaos would calm down and we would return to school soon, and I didn’t really have doubts about my summer plans. Well, look at what position we’re in now.

I still see people hanging out with each other when that’s the reason why everyone is supposed to stay home. I go on runs every day, and I never fail to see people ignoring the social distancing protocol.

For the first few weeks of quarantine, I was enjoying the time off as if it was summer break, doing almost nothing in terms of academics. I would study for the SAT, but that was kind of it. I would do SAT prep in the morning and then in the afternoon I would chill for a while and workout. When the announcement came out that we would be quarantined for the rest of the year, at first I was excited, but now I actually kind of miss school. After the announcement, I was still being lazy and procrastinating. I would only watch videos and take some notes on them in preparation for the AP World History exam, but I would easily get distracted and I wouldn’t focus on retaining the information from the videos. After dinner, I would either watch TV or play table tennis with Aria and my family. Overall, for the first few weeks (at least that’s what I think, I’ve lost track of time) I was pretty lazy, but I worked out and trained a lot. 

For the past few weeks, I would say that I’ve been pretty productive (Aria will always say otherwise, but I don’t listen to her). I’ve been studying a lot for the exam. I wake up earlier and start taking notes. I take notes in the morning until lunch, after lunch until around 4 p.m. and after dinner until around 9:30 p.m. During the time I’m not studying I’ve been training and working out. I planned out how many days I’m going to take notes, how many days I’m going to practice DBQs, which is what’s on the exam, and what I would be doing for training. I feel like I’m slowly getting my life together.

During my time in quarantine, I’ve been trying new things, discovering new things about myself, and all the boredom has allowed me to reflect on my past and plan for the future. This time at home also allows me to realize how much certain things mean in my life, and how much of my life these things, including school, friends and soccer, consume.

I hope that all this ends sooner rather than later because I really miss soccer and my friends. All this time of being stuck at home has made me almost completely forget what it felt like when nothing was wrong and everything was normal. Of course, I would remember what I did and my schedule and everything, but I miss the feeling of these things and experiences. Realizing that the things that I thought were “normal” and “regular” to me before but are gone now has made me miss these things just that much more.