By: Elvin Quan
Covid-19 has been a huge inconvenience during the recent years, bringing us countless negative impacts. Sure, I did play video games with my friends for hours until our parents had to drag us away from our devices to the dinner table, but overtime I went from having the time of my life to sitting in my chair slowly rotting away.
The first few weeks of quarantine gave everyone the feeling that things were amazing because there was no school, you could sleep in, eat whenever you want, and even slip in a few extra sessions of video games during class. Surprisingly, my grades also started to slip off because of some mysterious reason. All of the pleasures that Covid brought us felt too good to be true. And they were.
As time went on, more and more subtle inconveniences started to surface. At first, it started with people hoarding toilet paper which I thought was very funny until it started to get out of hand. While I was shopping with my mother at the local grocery store, I decided to stop by the snack aisle to find something to enjoy during my times of boredom when I literally saw someone trying to fit the entire aisle INTO THEIR SHOPPING BASKET. Piles of chip bags, candy bars, and popcorn began making their way into the basket while all I wanted was a bag of onion rings and some pretzels.
As I said, these situations only caused minor inconveniences since they all happened a few weeks after Covid. Unfortunately, time moved on and we all know that it only went downhill from there. A few months after Covid’s grand entrance I was starting to feel very bored and lonely.
One of my favorite hobbies, soccer, which requires multiple people compacted within a rectangular field to furiously kick a ball around until it lands in either team’s goals, was halted for a few seasons. There were no soccer games for me to play in, no one to pass the ball to and definitely no one for me dribble past. The best I could do was practice on my own. And that’s exactly what I did. “Practice makes perfect,” they always say, but where is the part where practice also makes a young soccer player lose his mind with boredom!? At least I learned to deal with that, because the worst part of Covid hadn’t arrived yet.
Fast forward a year into quarantine, and that was when the real impacts of Covid began to hit. I had rarely met anyone face to face other than my parents and that really made me feel lonely. Calling online just wasn’t the same. A part of me felt empty and missing. It was just my thoughts and I alone in the bedroom. Fortunately, Covid began to subside soon after and everything started to return normal again, but I will never forget the impacts it brought upon me. All in all, quarantine made my life miserable and I’m glad it’s done.