Dude, it’s been five months that I am stuck at home and I am still thinking about the life I had (we all had) before all this mayhem. The president has gone in perpetual isolation, PhilHealth is about to run out of funds, and I have become a Kpop fan with the ability to ask my idol out for dinner and suggest places and even drinks in Hangul given the chance. Life isn’t that good, but nevertheless still good at some point.
There’s been a lot of things I’ve learned to love while in my own isolation. The voices in my head have become friendlier that it allowed me to write a low-key decent fanfic and I am now working on chapter 6. I discovered an old friendship and I am glad we’re back on track, this time through fangirling and sharing little life lessons and discoveries. I am an active member of a three-people bible sharing group, and we do it over cups of coffee on Sundays. My dad and I subconsciously launched my room renovation project – he built me a closet, a bookshelf, a work desk, and a low table (I’ll post another entry on the details of this). The convenience of digitalized businesses (retail, banking) is also relevant that I bought different variants of coffee for my coffee maker (also a quarantine-induced buy), and at the same time scary because I’ve been losing my self-control lately whenever I see an available Jung Yong Hwa, CNBLUE and EXO merchandise on Facebook (oh, I am now a low-key Blink). Video chats are what I live for these days, if only to speak and see my friends, both from overseas and just from a different city. I’ve written my first-ever paid article on K-pop, watched a lot of Korean variety shows (and even did my own analyses on them), and currently reading my first book in months. As I write this, my life sounds so cool and privileged. But maybe I am just good at looking for good things.
Albeit these new experiences, I miss a lot of things from the old normal. I guess a lot of us do. I miss dressing up for Sunday mass. I realized this when I was having coffee one Sunday morning. I miss the entire process of selecting a Sunday outfit and putting on a subtle makeup. I miss taking myself out on a date, the indecisive me browsing restaurants on my phone trying to decide if it’s pasta arrabiata or an oxtail soup that I’ll have for lunch. I miss the random trip to the bookstores, browsing books and notebooks shelf after shelf, and buying the things that interest me, adding them to the pile of my unread books and blank notebooks. I miss the texts from my friends on whim on a Sunday afternoon, and we’d agree to have coffee somewhere in the area and talk about stuff until late in the evening. Sometimes we’d go to the movies, a marathon if there’s a Filipino movie festival.
Gosh, I miss the old days (and I am taking about the days just five months ago). But I know this shouldn’t mean I get stuck to it and refuse to accept the new normal, regardless if it was forcefully shoved in my face. It’s just fun to think of it now, that somehow I lived a life that’s worth remembering in times when I am sad and lonely. And this is the start – maybe I should begin to live a quarantined life that’s also worth remembering. My bullet journal can be my key in the future, to look back today. And I hope I don’t disappoint my future self.
Stay sane lovelies! <3