What isn’t living can’t really die

It takes about a week. Apparently, while I was locked in the ward with my screams and rage, a brand new disease was taking over the world. It was coming from the eastern edge of the world. We laugh about the coronavirus as travel restrictions kick in. It was mainly affecting very old people and of course we had to laugh about that. The memes of March 2020 are peak humor. Jokes run along the threads of how old people didn’t care about climate change so we don’t care that this disease is killing them. What goes around, comes around.

Nobody realized how serious it was. Colleges and companies with lots of money go into remote mode immediately. How ridiculous, what an overreaction, we laugh. 

Our last time together in the dorms, although we didn’t know it at the time, was the night of the Hutton Honors Ball. I get into my prom dress and do my blue hair up. You can see the black roots showing, after a month away from the dye bottle. I go to the ball with Tvisha and a mix of her and our honors program friends. It’s kind of like prom, but nerdier. Everyone is dressed to the nines and we toast to being young. I love being dressed up. Wearing makeup after a long time is like rediscovering your face. The sad, wretched hospital patient is gone for good, I tell myself as I slick my eyelashes with mascara. We take very cute pictures, all piled up on the stone steps inside the IMU. I get tired quickly, just as I expected, so I limp home down the street back to the dorms, for part two of the night, where my other friends were doing shrooms. It’s a night to remember and I finally feel like my old self. We laugh and make the same jokes we always do. They get wackier and wackier as the drugs take effect. Ian’s dorm is a three person room, but he’s alone. One roommate never showed up, the other dropped out of school last semester. They have a whole suite, with a couch and everything. We pull the couch out and blow up an inflatable mattress. Things get funky fast. We blast Green Day and Mother Mother and slam shots and dance into the night. 

At some point, I’m laying there on the floor, drunk, the tulle of my gown spread out around me and I’m laughing so hard my ribs ache, like I haven’t laughed in over a month. To upkeep traditions, we dye my hair again, all of us, together, just like that first time. If we’re gonna bleach it we’re gonna go all the way, and I give them permission to do three rounds of the stuff to get to platinum. As my hair turns from blue to pale green to yellow, I tell them about Michael, my handsome rescuer and they all throw things at me and tells me I should go do something about, he’s still there, isn’t he!? I throw the pillows back at them. 

“Am I the only one in here that still believes in the sanctity of a relationship?” I yell. 

“Not when it’s with Cal!” shouts back Ian and they all laugh. 

I smile at them, they don’t get it, but I don’t expect them to. Micahel was sacred, some kind of divine intervention. He didn’t even exist after I got discharged. Not only was I stubborn about uploading the honesty of my relationship, there was absolutely no fucking way I’d ever let be Cal right about his suspicions about my infidelity. He would win, and I would lose and I wasn’t going to let that happen. I deftly wave off the advances of any man that comes near me. Even if I found them attractive, the fact of the matter was simple: they weren’t Cal. Try as I might, I could never explain this to anybody. I couldn’t even imagine being with anybody who wasn’t Cal, it just wasn’t comprehensible. I was in way too deep. 

So when they kicked us out of the dorms and declared an emergency, it was a no-brainer to me to pack all my shit into the basement of my parents’ house and fly to New York, right to the epicenter. I felt like a bird flying in the opposite of everyone else fleeing the grasps of the disease. But we weren’t taking any of that seriously. Some of us never would. There would be parties throughout the pandemic, selfish people who didn’t care about the world. But all I know is, they threw us out of the dorms and every single class was online, which means there’s nothing stopping me from going to New York to spend the time with him. A global pandemic, sure, but that didn’t stop me.