Diary Entries

The sun is dancing across my screen as my fingers trip over the keyboard in a feeble attempt to touch type (yet another lockdown skill with questionable results).Birds are quite literally chirping as girls gossip over my head, distant laughter echoing through the courtyard. Its times like these, times when you expect someone to burst into song or frolic in the grass that you forget that anything happened in the first place. Maybe it’s the fact that were all clutching so desperately at the tattered remains of normality. The commodity of seeing real faces again or the burst of joy when you find a single door that hand-sanitiser is not mounted to it taking over our sense of reality. People are still sick, countries are still in lockdown, protests crowding streets and yet the sun is shining. How on earth can the sun still shine? Surely there’s some sort of cosmic deal: no picture-book-lighting when society is crumbling, no glorious days when our world is anything but basking in glory. I suppose that’s all we really have to cling to now, the fact that no matter who says what or who infects who, the sun still shines, the earth still turns, life goes on. But for a while there it seemed like we were frozen. Frozen in some twisted form of reality, a dystopian novel bursting from the pages. We stood dead still as hospitals flooded and death rates rose, as politics became nothing more then tired men and women, mere flesh and bone, clinging on to false promises. Our eyes were glued to our screens, minds racing as we watched. All we really can do it watch, watch as the sun shines.

I've got a headache. I know, I know, me and everyone else in the world. But I am quite literally sitting at a school desk, head bowed in concentration, throbbing as I write. The sky is grey and ashen, quite ironic really, seeing as it was filled with ash what seems like mere minutes ago. We were all so focused on not burning to a crisp Asia completely slipped our mind. How anything can slip the worlds mind, or even a nations mind is beyond me. And yet, it did. All of a sudden men in crisp suits were appearing on our televisions, statistics in hand, frowns plastered to their faces. But despite how dire things seemed, leather laden feet still carried us to the bus stop every morning. Bus passes gripped in sanitised hands. Soon however the bus was the very vessel that took us away from school. Books strapped precariously to our backs, breath strained with the effort of holding the equivalent to a pile of bricks, we left. Those very books were placed haphazardly on desk chairs, school bags stored away and uniforms folded. Early morning home room turned into a computer screen with weary faces speckled across it, as if in an old family sit-com. Political summits were held. Bleach seemingly the new Botox to a certain American representative. Death tolls rose and life went on. We found new ways of life, new patterns, new hope. Or, as my school teachers so eloquently put it, we found the new normal. Soon we edged our way back to school, books as heavy as ever, hearts a little more hesitant. So that leads me back to here. My school desk as cold and unforgiving as ever, head still hosting a rock concert and hand still scribbling away.