The year the world stood still.
It's been three years since I've sat behind this screen. A lot, and I mean A LOT, has happened.
I don't even know where to begin. One cannot just segue a span of three years without touching upon what has happened over that time, so allow me a moment to fill the gap.
Since my last post I've made career choices that are coming to fruition, and I put serious efforts into working on myself from the inside out. I decided to pursue tattooing and am currently in the middle of apprenticeship. I have connected with the love of my life and we've built a really nice little life together in our home in East Providence with our two fur babies (with a third fur baby soon on the way). I have been chronically ill my entire life and symptoms began to present themselves further. I have worked tirelessly to advocate for myself and get to a root of the problem, dancing between 10+ doctors, and have finally 3 years later, am making some headway. I had also just started practicing my new trade and things were really starting to align. My life was finally coming together. All the hard work and dedicated effort I have been slaving myself over these last few years was finally bringing me to a position where I could live my best life, truly and honestly.
Late February, early March, I started to hear news about COVID-19 from within my community. I'm not one to follow the news regularly, and often the first to question the credibility and validity of what is being presented. People were getting scared, but I wasn't. I couldn't understand. I have been working for a local coffee roaster and spent most of my shifts behind the bar in a Providence hotel lobby, where I interacted with both locals and international guests daily. Our little company has built a real community of regulars and, and over the last 6-7 months I had built real relationships with these people, they became friends.
Some were handling the onslaught better than others, some were shrugging it off and others were feeding off hysteria. It was becoming difficult to navigate friendly conversations, especially when I knew there was opposition within arms reach.
"It's a really big deal!"
"We're all going to get it, it's inevitable."
"Honestly, I don't see what the big deal is.."
Working in a service industry always has these challenges, we work with the public directly. I tried my hardest to maintain poise and integrity.
I started turning on the radio more frequently on my morning commute to check in with the whole situation, and give myself the ability to form my own opinions. A couple of weeks had gone by and I had yet to buy into the fear. I started comparing this pandemic to other epidemics we've had over the last couple of decades, and initially saw no additional threat beyond the fact that people could carry it unknowingly and asymptomatically to those who are at high risk. I started to hear nothing else on the news. We weren't being told anything else that wasn't related to COVID-19. I started wondering why and naturally thought this was being blown out of proportion.
"I'm immunocompromised and working in a hotel, and I'm not afraid of this virus." I mentioned to my nearest and dearest. "I'm honestly more afraid of the implications."
*****
Tuesday March 10th, 2020
I woke up at the crack of dawn and got in my car, heading north into the South Shore of Boston to visit a new doctor who I found on a list of specialists whom were listed as Lyme Literate (I have been misdiagnosed for years after multiple false negative western blots, but that's another story for another time). My 10am appointment required me to leave extra early in face of the Providence-Boston rush hour. I spent the entire time listening to the news. Italy had just began forcing lockdown, threatening arrest of citizens who left town for invalid reasons. "This is too Orwellian," I had thought to myself. I arrived to the office and while sitting in the waiting room, the television loomed echoes about the virus. "This is too much." I couldn't help but think to myself, "Is this really happening?"
*****
I went back to work that next morning, and business had already been suffering the last week since COVID-19 had landed on both US soil, and Rhode Island. St. Raphel Academy in Pawtucket had shut down temporarily upon a group returning from a European class trip, where one had fallen ill and tested positive. People were beginning to recluse. We were urged to take extra sanitary precautions in order to keep business operating. We refused reusable cups from our customers, and had medical grade Sani wipes behind the counter, and were wiping all touch points every 30 minutes (using a timer) on top of already washing our hands regularly, we increased hand washing tenfold. Over the course of a week my hands had already aged a decade. I was washing them raw.
Our coffee company had just opened a brand new location, their first stand alone, their pride and joy, and instead of business booming, it simply started disappearing. I started to worry, is this going to cripple all the small businesses that make Providence, Providence?
Events all around the world were being cancelled, the NBA, the NHL and the MLB cancelled their scheduling. "What? Really? Over a VIRUS?" I was thinking to myself. Not once over those few weeks was honest information presented to me about the virus itself, just about how the world was reacting. The only thing I knew is "we don't know much about it," and "it's the unknown that is heading way to these precautions." My partner was urged by his company to begin working from home "indefinitely." Our world was changing overnight.
Even then, I was still only afraid of the implications.
*****
Friday March 13th, 2020
I woke up and got to work as usual. The hotel was having problems with their radio; we were working in silence and I was working my shift solo, which wasn't abnormal for such a small location, especially during the slower season. I started playing music off my phone, to try to break the silence, it was tinny and shrill as phone speakers tend to be in an empty room. It was dark, cloudy and drizzling outside. The air was ominous. I was supposed to attend the Against Me! concert that evening at the Met, and that same morning it was announced that they had to postpone the rest of their tour. Only a handful of regulars came in for coffee that morning. A few guests staying in the hotel, whom were actually musicians in town to play at the Columbus Theater that evening, were checking out and heading home instead. They congregated in the lobby, discussing their feelings about what was happening for an hour or two. They were the only beings separating me from the silence that morning, but soon enough they left, and I was left alone, in silence, with the bored valet, and one other employee at the hotel's front desk.
That's when it really started to get eerie. I went nearly 2 hours without a sale. I kept business as usual, brewing a new pot of coffee on the hour. "I have a fresh pot of coffee waiting for ya," I had captioned on a photograph I took of the empty lobby and shared it on social media. "FINE" was illuminated in neon lights against the wall. Which couldn't be further from the truth. I started to feel really depressed, lost, scared and confused. Anxiety was setting in, my heart began racing, I started commisserating.
A colleague of mine reached out that they weren't feeling well, that they needed the shift following mine covered. Another colleague reached out that they were closing down the location they were working at, in the CIC building, a co-working space open to the public. The CIC was ultimately closing their doors to avoid spreading of COVID-19, and that they would be by to relieve me of my shift soon.
I started having a panic attack. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't think straight. I was choking back tears and trying not to freak out the valet. I had cracked. I knew, right then and there, that life was never going to be the same again.
I left work that afternoon, and took the night off from my apprenticeship because I couldn't attend for my mental health after such a stressful morning. I clocked out and gave encouraging thoughts to my colleague. As I stepped outside, drizzle hitting my face, I attempted to take a deep cleansing breath. Albeit, the air was suffocating. I had never seen the streets of Providence so quiet, not even in the early 2010's when Westminster Street hardly had any foot traffic. I decided to walked the few blocks down to our new location, to say hi to my colleagues and check in on everyone's wellbeing, and have a damn beer.
I crossed the parking lot, and set foot onto the sidewalk along Washington Street, turning around and scanning the horizon, my glasses coated in tiny water droplets. You could smell fear in the air.
"It's quite dystopian, isn't it?"
I heard a familiar voice, as I noticed a regular walking my way with a bag of groceries in her arms.
That was the last time I saw her face in person. It was the last day that I had worked. It was the last day our lives existed in context of "Before COVID."
Friday the 13th.
