My Quarantine Life

Quarantine was a blast. No, not the fun kind. The blinding, deafening, god-I-wish-I-wasn’t-here-in-the-first-place blast. What was I thinking? Oh wait, I wasn’t. Who picks up their suitcases in the middle of a global pandemic and TRAVELS ACROSS THE WORLD for university? Yours truly, actually. It all started when Trent University really subtly said “Hey, come back to Canada or you won’t be able to get your credits done in time”. But this is how it went like in my head “Hey, come back to Canada or you won’t be able to get your courses on time, so you probably won’t graduate on time, hence you will fail and drop out of university, and end up a total and complete failure”. Dramatic, right? Keep reading, this is just the tip of the iceberg. After a 14.5 hour gruesome flight from India to Canada, I landed here gripped with fear because my brain went into overdrive with questions like “What if they don’t let me in the country?” or “What if I piss off the immigration officer and get deported?” or the worst one “Oh my god, what if I sneeze in front of everyone?”. But the airport had something else in store for me. They wanted me out of there as fast as possible (not that I was complaining), and in that hurry they didn’t even check my temperature. Modern day horror story right? (fits well considering we’re it’s Halloween month) Anyway, a long cab ride later(and expensive), I was back in Peterborough. Fun. Not.

Thus began my quarantine. 14 drab, boring, slow paced days. So not really different from how my life normally is. My sample day looked a little like this- I would wake up at 4AM because of a)the cars drove by from right in front of my house and b)my first night in Peterborough, I passed out at 7PM, thus ensuing a week full of a messed up sleep schedule due to horrible jetlag. Moving on, my day started at 4AM, when I would wake up and yet lie in my bed for hours to either play Call Of Duty or scroll through thousands and thousands of posts on Instagram. Then at about 7-8AM I’d feel guilty for wasting hours of my day, so I’d make the go to breakfast(which also delicious, by the way) for every university student- Ramen noodles. Ugh, just looking at them now makes me lose my appetite. But for the first seven days, my breakfast, lunch and dinner(sometimes also known as a midnight snack) would be consist of this major food group- Noodles. Which was going great, until I ran out.

Then I had to get creative with my food. Minimal effort, but maximum satisfaction. That week if someone would’ve looked at my google history it would’ve said things such as “5 minute dinner recipes”, “How to make 5 minute dinner with less ingredients” or the best one “How to make a dinner meal with just bread and spices”(this one didn’t disappoint me though). After food came lazing round in my room, unpacking(nope, this is a horror story for another time), scrolling through my phone until my battery ran out, cleaning up the flooded basement( Right? Just threw that in there casually) and constantly thinking “Gosh I would sell a limb to go back home right now”.

Thank god I didn’t because after quarantine came online classes. And I needed all my working body parts to get through that torture. So currently I’m in this phase of online classes- I look at my list of assignments to do, I take a deep breath, sit on my table, open my laptop, and then Netflix for hours until I feel the guilt just eating away. Then I torture myself even more by staying up all night to do the work I was supposed to do hours ago. I have a feeling this phase is going to last for a bit. So whoever said it gets easier, don’t ever listen to them because clearly they were never a university student who sat and cried in their tiny little room because they were 23 days behind whilst eating ramen noodles(Ugh, it always ends with ramen noodles).