The Unexpected

The thing is it happens when your guard is most down. The unexpected. That is when the most affecting things seem to unload upon your life. When it is full of so much, is too full, to even consider such things that do not partake to you. As disasters always have a way with timing, it never fails to create itself where it can hurt the most. It takes being as selfish as beings like us, to dismiss some of the most important issues occurring world-wide, and be hit with them the most when the time comes. Having a constant cycle of things, people, places, and thoughts to attend to, to having it all ripped away is when you finally realize what you really have. It is when you are placed in legitimate isolation, when you are pressured into a habitat of the most self-relying, lonely, and daunting atmosphere without choice, that you’re left only to reflect. A pandemic that has disrupted all nations and stopped all routine and motion, that it has brought to many of us realization. There is more to us than our lives allow us to see. COVID-19 was unexpected. Therefore, as restrictions are enhanced, each of our homes would slowly become our everyday and the outside would turn into more of a sight-seeing attraction from its unfamiliarity. 

Possibilities limited, opportunities dismissed, time cut. Our clock ran on the time of a virus that had full control over what we could and could not do. Time increasing and feeling unreal, you begin to realize in your own solitude what you could not in such noise and movement. A comprehension that your reliance falls heavily on everything you have built your life to be accommodated with. A sponge consuming every emotion that you are given and received, through every experience in a place or thing, and within a person. As humans in some form we place our dependence over the things that can provide for us what we cannot and enhance the things we know we have or can do but need support. It only becomes clear that any of these things are as necessary as they are until they are no longer available to you when you need or want them. That is when you come to terms that you are invested less in self-sufficiency and more upon co-dependency. It is when you come to terms with your emotional, mental, and physical survival necessity that keeps you stable. As the unexpected can disrupt and disaster can destroy, its mayhem can change the course of many things, even our perspectives.

Danysha Estrada is a student at West Warwick High School in West Warwick, Rhode Island.