You are at a coast, standing alone while staring the vast ocean. The sound of wave, cold breeze, and moon light accompany your present there. Something flying by catches your eyes. A sheet of fabric is being blown by the dawn wind, until it lands beside you. It is a mask. It has been a long time, huh? For the pandemic affecting all side of your life.
You begin to recall the moment you were starting that year. How excited you were to do everything you want to do. Plan and dream were created for that year and beyond. You pushed your interest to be explored and developed. You were fascinated of what the new land had and offered to you. It went so well. Until, the first news arrived.
"A new flu-like disease emerge in a city in the Far East"
At first, you and other people overlooked it. Diseases come and go in the news every year. Humanity has advanced a lot since the history of pandemic. Sanitation, vaccines, antibiotics, modern medical technology, and a better understanding of human body have distanced humans from their illness. We were not living in middle age, were we?
Until, the quarantine happened. It turned out that even our modern technology cannot prevent the pandemics from happening. People often worried that nuclear war or climate change will bring humanity to an end, yet they forget something that's also fragile in our civilization: our own human body.
But you were still ignorant, thinking the quarantine would only last two weeks, or a few months at max. You smile, remembering how naive and denial you are.
Border was closed, voyage and commutation were restricted, as the isolation began. Your life has been different since that day. Not just you, but so every person in this world. At first, you were fine with it. But then, it became a disaster.
Your plan you were made earlier that year was just shattered. There was no longer a fuel for your dream and passion, now they died out. As your pleasure became unavailable, you searched for new contentment. Some worked, some did not. Your once reliable source of enjoyment even could not help you this time.
You played the same routine every day, bed to bed, morning to morning, trapped inside the border. Your life became highly monotone, with no variation in the slightest. Excitement changed into dullness. You felt empty every time you wake up. Even your last sleep's dream was more fun than what you would do today. It feels that the isolation was just robbing two years of your life in what should be the most productive years yet.
Slowly, it changed you, it corrupted you. The disease does not only plague human body, but also plague your mind through isolation. Dullness changed into insanity. Your soul degraded as you watch it's collapsing in front of you.
There are not much you can tell as nothing really happened back then. You do not remember, not because you are forgetful, but because there was nothing to be remembered to. It only contained loneliness and emptiness.
You started the pandemic by hoping. Hoping that it would end soon. Throughout the pandemic you hoped, but every time you hoped, the end was not seen coming. Months, year later you gave up. You tired of hoping in the middle of uncertainty. Meanwhile, you built resistance and immunity to lessen the effect as you had felt before. You tried to make peace and accept the situation.
And it had been going until now, alone in this coast. Now you are adapted and don't really mind about the end of the pandemic anymore. Sometimes you wonder, what is happening on the other side of the sea. Suddenly, you notice a dot of light in the far horizon. You know that it is not a star, nor a planet. It seems approaching you, awaken your lost hope, as the sun rise again in the East.
2020, Glass Plague
and
2021, Period of Isolation
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