Ah yes, 2020: the year that was supposed to be good but pretty much turned out the total opposite.
Graduations were cancelled, travel bans were enacted, movie releases were postponed, businesses shut down, many beloved celebrities passed away and most significantly of all — the quarantine started. Summer this year was pretty much cancelled, for absolutely everyone.
Yet, I for one found myself having the best holiday I have ever had in a while. When I found out about quarantine, I don’t think I cared much. I’ll admit right now that I’m a total introvert. So I guess my opinion has less weight when I say summer this year has actually been pretty good!
Now, I didn’t get to do a lot or anything special in Vancouver — but as a homebody, that was enough for me! Nobody bothered me much (you best believe people kept their personal space for once), there were no essays or assignments to hand in at chaotic deadlines, I got to sleep as long as I wanted; I was living in paradise.
Now I’m in no way trying to downplay the horrible impact of quarantine, but rather trying to look at the bright side — and it seems like things were mostly bright in my experience. I went to visit my older sister in Ottawa at her apartment for a while too. We got to play video games, have picnics in a park and binge-watch loads of movies together. We got to do so many things that we had not been able to do in a long while.
It felt pretty great to reconnect with her through the things we used to do together. I hadn’t really seen her in person for two years (we were both busy and in different provinces, so we only had Skype video calls from time to time).
I’m not sure if we’ll ever be this close again. Even if I don’t think I learned anything new about myself or her, we had a lot of fun anyway. In a sort of peculiar way, COVID-19 brought us together.