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You sit down.
You turn on your computer.
You drink your tea.
You start your day.
It tastes stale by now – you made it only a few minutes ago, but you’ve been repeating the same routine so much that nothing is fresh anymore. Everything feels stale, your bedroom, your phone, all your days blend into one until deadlines are the only thing indicating any time is passing at all. Staring into a screen until your vision goes blurry – more and more quickly, you notice – you get the urge to change your life completely. In a frenzy, you change your desktop background to a picture of a field, you buy a new, blindingly white coffee cup, you take your classes in the kitchen and you relish in the warm clean light from the balcony… But you notice that the haze follows you and, before you get a moment to breathe, the field is just a reminder of what you don’t have anymore, your cup is stained and your kitchen table is beginning to remind you of the apartment from Trainspotting.
You consider picking up smoking.
You go for a run instead.
It’s refreshing.
It clears your head.
You feel your lungs fill with the chilly air and finally you feel alive again, so you run until you get lost and then you run back, and this time you don’t hesitate to go back to your apartment because finally, finally, there is something to look forward to tomorrow. And you do it again the next day and after fifteen minutes you’re exhausted but it feels so amazing so you do it again and again and again, and after a month you’re up to half an hour, and you’re researching races and telling all your friends and drinking isotonic drinks like they’re a fountain of youth. Instead of the number of COVID cases you’re looking at the number on your stopwatch and you can’t imagine how anything could ever get bad again.But winter comes. The clean air no longer feels fresh, it feels sharp, and the frost is tearing at the skin on your hands. You want that free feeling again but you’re so used to it that it’s just another habit by now, just another chore. And so you start exercising at home, you go through YouTube video after video after video, you start knitting, you wonder why the 19th century aristocrats on the TV don’t wear masks, and you do anything to fill your days and the whole time some voice is telling you this isn’t how it’s supposed to be, this can’t be all there is, isn’t there supposed to be more to being a teenager?
But there isn’t, not right now.
So you sit down.
You turn on your computer.
You drink your tea.
You start your day.
Kira Vlašić, XV. gimnazija