A year on
This showed up in my Timehop today. Exactly a year ago (and after a night of general shenanigans with John Michael and Miranda), the national government of Italy closed down schools indefinitely. I almost missed the last bus that night, scared I’ll be stuck in Lingotto until morning.
Little did I know that I would not be able to set foot on campus grounds again. Because of UN restrictions, we were barred from entering the school premises even months later. After this decree, some classmates scrambled to return to their home countries, and the class won't be able to ever reconvene in person. The term would have to be finished online, which meant spending eight hours of instruction before a computer screen until the end of July.
Had I done some things differently knowing it was the last "normal" day? Yes. I would have gone out more and explored Torino instead of burying myself in my LLM. I would have hung out more with friends. I would have gone to the last aperitivo hosted by my brilliant Japanese professor. Hindsight sometimes gifts us with these regrets.
At the time the decree was issued, Italy was on track to be Europe's COVID epicenter. I cooped up in my apartment and switched to survival mode. I was alone in a foreign land during strange times. Death was everywhere and palpably so: every half hour, I would hear ambulance sirens. The sound of the plague was as sure to come as the sound of nearby church bells.
The months that followed could arguably be the most productive period of my life. I wrote many things, then creating through lenses tinted with hope that we would return to normalcy in a few weeks.
This is, of course, far from the truth. Back home, the pandemic meant sounding the death knell of our freedoms. The perfect storm fell, emboldening madmen and petty tyrants to rob our souls.
I still write things now, though no longer cast in optimism. Funny what a year in isolation and frustration can do. If any at all, I have retained a spirit of defiance, now needed more than ever. I still ask the same question I asked then: what will be our stories for and of the world of tomorrow?
Except that world is already our present, bathed in the urgency of despair.