text: As of this afternoon, although restrictions have intensified across the country and the globe, the stun has lifted for me a bit. The panic and nervousness has lessened, but I still feel my eyes open in shock -- at least they are able to absorb what is going on, notice things that I may not see again in this lifetime. The way that teachers go on parades in local neighborhoods because they miss their students, colored banners and signs out the windows. How last week, a man saw a girl dancing on her rooftop and he asked her out on a date via drone, and they face-timed at separate tables from their own roofs. How he walked around in a bubble holding flowers for her he hopes to one day give her. How I hope they make it. Somehow in the midst of all this, it became all about the little things... the things that we so often do not notice here in the west because we live on such a grand scale. Bigger better harder faster stronger, our internal mantra hypnotizing us into consumerism and fast-paced living without our knowledge. The good that we are starting to see is vital to not just human life, but the continuation of it, in a time where that is uncertain. Naturally, as one or many do in a global pandemic, consecutively and consequentially we begin speculating. And once one starts speculating, it is difficult to stop, like an unwarranted brainstorm, the storm in this reference being quite literal. We may cease if we had gotten or would get some answers, but for weeks and weeks, there were none. Whether it was over conversations at bonfires we would have around the lake in the coming weeks while on lockdown or on our own quarantined in our living rooms, we would type 'c' into our search bars on the web and watch 'coronavirus' automatically pop up. Clicking on it reflexively would take us to the known facts, the ones that still didn't give us any answers. When Google loads your request and pulls up the search results around the pandemic, everything is in red. Scrolling past the 'SOS Alert' and 'Emergency' tabs highlighted in crimson, past the headlines meant to make your heart skip a beat, past the signs and symptoms, the do's and don'ts of how to personally handle your own hygiene and safety, was a map. You could see the colored variations of the spikes in diseases along the hemispheres, wondering if this was related to any lateral concept, or any concept at all. Wondering if there were any hints that we were missing, we understood that it was clear we could name this virus, but we could not predict it. Not even the heads of hundreds of the most intelligent and educated scientists in the world could... so what was I thinking, imagining I could solve the mysteries of the universe from my living room after binge-watching Tiger King just to understand the memes circulating? There was a natural and human inclination for all of us to attempt to get a mental handle on all that was reverting to chaos around us. In this grapple for understanding, we become more intense, heightened versions of ourselves. I lean back on the ottoman and watch the rain knock lightly on my window, an inanimate, non-autonomous thing that seemed to have a mind of its own, leaving marks on the things it does not know it touches, cleansing, yet potentially deadly. I bite my lip and try not to relate the splendor of rain to the nondiscriminatory hurricane that has been passing through the bodies of humans. I think how speculation has led to some sort of acceptance. I think about how last week, I didn't see it coming, but at 4:00pm on a Friday all of a sudden it hit me that there is a 99% possibility that life as we know it has changed forever. It's something you live with an awareness of, but then the conscious revelation of it makes you a bit lightheaded. I was now out of the panic and the shock, the shock that didn't feel like shock as much as it did a dull ache of inability to take all this as seriously as I maybe should have, and soon after that comes the landing. And as I am landing, I realize I am not settling as much as I am sinking into this new reality. The pressure confines me to a small speck of land in the middle of an unknown, uncharted ocean. I am too near-sighted to see another place to swim toward, maybe one with a larger surface area and other paths to walk. Instead I am alone here on this island of mine, limited in understanding. The new realities that we approach as people are not things that we will approach as much as we will fall into. What will they look like? How constricting will they be? The curious among us turn into scientists, the most bitter of us turn into critics, the extremists turn into evangelists, the lost into scavengers, but all of us would become a bit more human. I was a little bit of all of those things. I would stare at the map on my phone, littered with red blotches in contemplation, then silently shame humanity for all that we had done to Earth. I would scold myself for not praying five times a day like I meant to, then scour the internet for memes or wholesome articles, then resolve into the scavenge: looking for the good in the gray areas of the unknown waters that we charted. The format of this in present-day circumstances was sending memes to people even if only to incite laughter, kickstarting our hearts back into a soft place, or forwarding wholesome articles and videos promote positivity in a time that felt so bleak. We became human in that we search, rake through the fear, the unknown, for the promise, the proof that just because humans are dying at faster rates, humanity is not yet gone.