Dispatches from Quarantine:
Young People on Covid-19
Angelina Gao
April 21, 2020
My desk faces a window. The windowsill is dusty, so are the blinds, and the windowpanes, and there isn’t much of a view. When I look out, I am greeted by a tall palm tree. The tips of its fronds are turning yellow. I hope it is not diseased. Behind the palm tree is our neighbor’s house, below it is a fence, crawling with honeysuckle.
Before it all, I rarely looked out this window. What’s on the desk in front of me was more important – textbooks, homework, the essay I type away at as my eyes fix blankly at a computer screen. The view outside was a distraction from my work, so the blinds were angled in a way that they blocked most of the sunlight and all of the sky.
A part of me is grateful for this pandemic. For the first time in many months, I open my window all the way, and pull up the blinds. I am met with birdsong.
They visit nearly every day. A pair of house finches, perhaps a mourning dove, a flash of iridescent green that announces the arrival of a hummingbird that flits amongst the honeysuckle tendrils. My neighbor’s plump black-and-white cat drops by too – he, too, watches the birds as he perches demurely on our shared fence, taking in the sun. I take pictures of them through my dusty windowpanes with the fascination of a new parent crooning over their infant, eagerly sharing the too-zoomed-in, blurry photographs with everyone around me who cared to see.
Many curse this pandemic, cry over the state of the economy, lament the supposed restriction of their first amendment rights. While they do so, I put aside my schoolbooks for a few hours and sit in the sunlight at my desk. I pull open the blinds and watch the birds outside.
