Despite the time I’ve had to mull over the past few months, the shock was initially quite intense: being sent home to the quiet of Florida from the ever-bustling campus of Harvard felt something like the decompression sickness that scuba divers experience when coming up to the surface too quickly. Suddenly my days are filled with a sunny, sticky warmth and last a few generous hours longer. And yet, I often find myself lacking any incentive or objective to spend my extra time. I took on a few hobbies, making banana bread (as everyone and their mother also have), sketching, brewing coffee beans to the exact tenth of a gram, but the daily repetition without any clear end in sight feels strange and bizarre to me. For a time, I amused myself by making connections between my own lifestyle to the tale of Sisyphus, who is punished by perpetually pushing boulders up mountains only for them to fall again.

I feel uncomfortable. I feel almost as an outside observer watching myself go through the same motions, at times ashamed to watch myself baking blueberry muffins but also reading news of the disconnect of unbelievably steep unemployment rates, miles-long lines for food banks, and the tons of produce which farmers must throw away due to the break in the supply chain. Perhaps I feel some sense of survivor’s guilt: I did nothing exceptional to deserve my sense of security, yet others have it so much worse in these times. If anything, I am exceptionally lucky. Lucky to be fed, lucky to be able to donate, lucky to have online resources, lucky to feel bored.

The prospect of missing the equivalent almost an entire academic year of in-person college was upsetting at first; I actually cried with my friends when rumors first began spreading among Harvard faculty and students. Now, I’ve mostly come to terms with it, perhaps collaterally a result from my general underlying feelings of numbness.

Honestly, I enjoy watching movies, I enjoy reading, and I enjoy doing perfectly mundane things with my mom in the garden. I’ve actually spent a lot of time in the yard recently, picking up fruit and pulling out weeds as she tells me to. My mom has this papaya tree which she has nurtured back into health after it fell over and literally broke in half during Hurricane Irma. After propping it up horizontally with some bricks and some rope, it quite miraculously grew back into health and continued sprouting vertical branches, each bearing its own bundle of fruit. I like to imagine that the tree thanked my mother for her ongoing faith in it despite its condition with its multiplied productivity, since a normal tree only has one vertical end and thus has only one bundle of fruit. Regardless of my musings of the tree’s psyche, my family enjoys its ripe fruit on a weekly basis.

I think that the pandemic has brought out the worst in some people: the extremes of ignorance, of indifference, of bigotry. But I also think it has brought out the best in people. Communities supporting healthcare workers and the massive showcases of compassion and generosity for others in need are a source of hope. Personally, I hope that the papaya tree and its tenacity serves as a symbol of the resilience of humans. Disaster may strike, and perhaps there will never be a true “return to normal,” but I am hopeful that the bright side of it all is that it will bring attention to systematic flaws in societies, bring awareness to others’ suffering, and bring changes to solve these problems. Hopefully it will be over as soon as possible once a vaccine is found, and that the necessary actions and kindness from our communities will ease the time from now till then.