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From the Inside:  Excerpts From a Journal Made Five Months into Lockdown

The year rolled with a certainty of a made promise: I was going to earn my medical license on time. The end of postgraduate internship was five months away. My words have become more certain, my actions more exact, and my white coat heavier with responsibilities by the day. The timeline was neatly tabbed and slotted: celebrating my 6th graduation, swimming in the ocean, and leaving for Manila to review. After two decades of school, life felt like it was about to begin…until it was not made to.

Up north was a brewing catastrophe allegedly hidden from the rest of the world. People who spoke about it disappeared. A novel virus has robbed people of their gift to effortlessly breathe. The world is devoid of smiling faces. Word spread about cities being locked down and people spending their last breaths alone and in pain. The call to close the borders came like a distant warning: heard, but not listened to. As they say, it was just a flu. What’s a flu compared to tuberculosis? When you live on a hand-to-mouth wage, a pause is not an option. January went by with plans made for the future.

February came with a dash of fear. The virus made its presence known and my fingers were enough to count the cases in the country. Temperature checks were everywhere and health declaration forms piled up. Travel history was the most constant part of me seeing patients. Early on, I knew people were going to learn to lie and they did. Supplies of masks and vitamin C ran out that even working in a hospital did not give me any advantage. Deep down, I knew whatever it was would linger. I’ve never wanted to be massively wrong in my life with thorough and exacting conviction until that day.

I was an OB intern when it was announced halfway through March that we’re pulled out from our posts. Since then, I was in a whirl of fog, heart beating dully in my chest with a sense of time running out. The neatly tabbed timeline was gone. Will they extend my internship? Will they cancel my exam on September? It didn’t help that I was almost 27 and do not have much. Meanwhile, dead bodies piled up and people were mad and hungry. It occurs to me now that my days were pretty strange. I’d wake up early despite not sleeping much, starfish-splayed in my bed and staring at the ceiling. In this solitude, I have tried to either write or paint (again)…except I couldn’t. I was good at producing nothingness. Until one afternoon, I decided to go out, my back sighing and limbs aching from disuse. I have forgotten just how striking summer afternoons are. The sun was casting an extra hint of honey and gold against the walls and pavements. The leaves have taken off their dark green suits for rest and have worn themselves random strokes of yellow. A man cycling his fish ball kiosk passed by, he’d earned just enough for the day. The ground was covered with dried leaves and wilted wildflowers. The grasses finally couldn’t hold themselves up and had surrender to their unquenched thirst. Just like that, it was two days shy of May.

What happened next were nothing sort of what people were used to. People’s faces were covered, some with makeshift masks out of old clothes. It became increasingly difficult to explain to kids why they couldn’t play outside. Jobs lost, flights cancelled, hope running out. Donation drives grew like wild mushrooms, more and more people were needing help to make it. It felt wrong to smile and some days, it was difficult to find reason to. Sleep refused to come at night and I was all wide awake with the canvass of millions of halted plans and uncertain lives. Does it get any better? Will it ever end? All I can hear is the anguish of family members survived by these premature deaths. No one deserved to die alone and in the streets, but it happened. I could only watch from my sorry privilege.

More months passed and I graduated from internship. My 27th birthday came. A lot had to quit jobs. Few started their own businesses while others closed theirs. Relationships broke and made. Most painfully, my exam was postponed. Time was not on my side. Pointing where it hurt was difficult because it ached everywhere. Life went on and I have learned to tag along its course, with little energy to complain or even hope. Alone in my bedroom, I watch the numbers rise. I felt so inadequate knowing I was also a nurse before this chapter of my life and I couldn’t be out there and help. Debt rose to an amount I don’t even encounter in gradeschool Math. Breathing just a little deeper run with risks. Some days I’m lucky to experience transient joy. I hold on to those.

From where I am, rain has replaced the scorching sun and people have started to wear their hats and jackets. The bees have frequented the sunflowers blooming their fullest along the bike lanes. People have started to go back to their jobs. I am reviewing from home for my exam. From the inside, I’m finding the simple charm nested in life’s quotidian details. Except that the virus is still out there lurking, waiting for another host.

Maybe one day it could go back to how it used to be. Maybe it won’t and we will adapt with the change. Nothing is certain in this world. But you can believe in something.

I can only write this to remember.

#quarantine #stories #journal