Co-roma Someplace else

We had a weekend of sixty and seventy degree weather; Fahrenheit of course. It did not rain, and winds were manageable. It was the wind that made the warm weather still feel like winter and not yet spring; maybe a beach night in August. The snow that towered the dirt in my home in New Hampshire had tampered off and melted away, as I slowly melted from New Hampshire and into Boston with a new semester of school starting.
When returning to Boston I had noticed two things; One, more people, especially men, wear earmuffs than I remember seeing before. Two, litter. Although, the snow has melted in Boston as it had at home, the ground was still filled with an off white tinge due to wrappers of Riccola and Halls cough drops. Three (not yet observed but as I start my train commutes will be), these litter flurries are foreshadowing bedrest for me in a few weeks. I just know it.
The difference between living outside of the city and in the city is also the pace in which one moves. Speed limits run higher in the foot race world which lead me to the realization that we are always running. This does not mean physically, for not all of us are capable to. By running I mean, despite all of our differences we all posses the quality to run. Run from our fears, run out of gas, a running nose, and we are always running out of time.
I have talked about time previously in an article on death, but that was post-time. Why not discuss the constant state of time; current or present.  What are you doing. with yours? What am I doing with mine? The present is probably. the scariest time for the past we have survived no matter what. 

I wrote the previous 22 January, 2020. It is now 02 April of the same year and I find myself all with too much and too little time on my hands. The world has also, unfortunately succumbed to that illness those cough drop wrappers foreshadowed from those train commutes -though I don't think it was a Zones 7 through 1 passengers who plagued us originally-but I know some weren't helping the cause that is going on now.
 I was barely back at school for my second semester when Massachusetts announced a state of emergency due to the Corona virus outbreak. My friend, for privacy reasons we'll call her K, and I were walking around Boston and Cambridge on one of the first nice nights the city had offered us this year. Everything was going well. K isn't from the United States, she lived in Africa for seventeen years and picked me to learn about the city. That night I introduced her to the Boston Pops through the hatch shell. Pops, P.O.Ps, Ping Of Pong, Boston's known for being notorious ping pong champions, right?    We walked to Cambridge, counting the number of SMOOTS on the way. We toured the esplanade- too early for the cherry blossoms, walked into The Liberty Hotel, and as I was teaching her about Boston she was teaching me about The Bachelor. What we didn't know at the time was it was going to be the last moment we were just going to be wasting time as a choice. Within the next hour her phone dinged, mine vibrated with our school announcing we would be holding no more physical classes for the rest of the semester. All students are to take action to either prepare to stay in place on campus or make plans to move out.
My dad picked me up two days later- it was a Thursday. K and I hung out for a little bit that afternoon chasing squirrels in the Boston Public Garden. She's afraid of pigeons and I'm assuming squirrels as well as she runs behind me or the nearest bench when they approach her, after her endless taunts. We tried feeding them some eggs, but as I've learned time and time again, they prefer trash. The sky was grey and the air was cold. I would like to say that was why Boston seemed to be home to only K and I. I know in my heart that it wasn't the weather that made the city vacant but the city was all in a panic and scare, and not of city doves or bush tailed rats.
I returned home only to one night of solidarity of being an only child before my older brother decided to leave his little apartment in the country's capital in fear that he would be stuck there. My twin sister coming home after her school transferred to online as well. We are all now home together, close and closed quarters without the holiday cheer besides April Fool's Day.  Counting down the days until one of us are infected or my sanity completely drains.

Let's talk about time. The reason I was writing this article in the first place. I didn't give myself enough time to write a smoother transition from this paragraph to the one above it, even though now I find myself both with too much and too little time on my hands. Given the worlds current situation, a pandemic acts like molasses added to a mixture. What was once moving at a steady speed now feels like its being pulled, dragged and the rotations are labored. Father Time himself has forgotten to charge the worlds batteries or fill its tank with gas and now we're running on fumes, while our lungs fill with the exhaust. Some of us can fill this time slot by working from home, whether this is our careers or school. That helps time go by a little. In my state we are allowed to still go on walks, my twin sister and I are averaging around 8 miles a day, splitting it up around each meal. We have made a turkey friend, we call Dandy for a feather persistently sticking up on his chest as if Yankee Doodle had stuck it there himself. We have even noticed the little beauties this town we grew up in offers, now viewing it as an adult rather than a child who only saw homes as color and not architecture. We've seen a window frame finally get fixed and a child go from a tricycle to a bicycle in just two weeks.
 As more and more of us loose our jobs, loose sales, income, our electricity bill rises as the boom of streaming services tantalizing us with things like Frozen 2 on Disney+ and The Tiger King (not on Disney+, not a sequel to The Lion King. Children.). The word "bored" is being. used more often than before as public places close and we keep distance from one another. I have already alluded to the idea of boredom in a past article I had written, however, in today's state are we really ever bored? If you are reading this article right now you have access to the internet, meaning you also have the whole world wide web to surf and explore. Therefore one cannot be bored if you have access to anything and everything in the palm of your hands. Try being bored, This may mean laying on the kitchen floor with your legs sprawled out as if doing a half floor-angel, tapping your foot against the kitchen stool, matching the ticking to the clock on the wall- but wait, there is not clock on the wall, that's just your imagination because time is moving so slowly with nothing to do, nothing to look at, and now your imagining not only visions but sounds. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. No, you're not going crazy. You're just bored. When we give up our social media, our television, and our texting we rely on other sources to quench our bored selves. Pick up a book, pick up a pen or pencil, paint or clay, or go on a walk and listen to the oldest DJ around, Mama Nature (getting hotter every year too, because some of you still refuse to recycle and/or carpool or even now wearing  your gloves in stores, then tossing them on the curb outside- but I digress). 

In this time of too much and too little to do we see the world sharing their creativity. The internet has provided resources that has brought a community together across the globe, we are indeed all in this together, and we cannot forget that. There have been people taking up cooking and baking as hobbies and challenging one another in competitions with them. Other's have used their time in stepping up for one another by sewing masks. Dogs exhausted from that four letter word W-A-L-K that use to make the R-U-N when they heard it. We're giving ourselves bangs, dying our hairs- hell, the news was on so much I had to dye my hair red because I was seeing too many blonde ladies!  Some towns have had hunts, such as putting bears in the windows for families to drive around and look for. Lines to get gallons of paint surpass the lines of summer amusement parks as we're all spending a majority of time at home realizing the color in the guest bathroom just won't do.   Playgrounds are bare, malls are closed, and concerts are only existing if Elton John streams them, but we are all in a world of an unknown. "I can't wait for things to be back to normal". But what is normal? What will be normal? When all of this is over will I still feel an anxiety to hug you? Will toilet paper still be hard to find or will it be the next hunt for families to find around town? What about this technology boom with everyone working from home- are we phasing out human interaction quicker than we thought? I don't have the answer, though you didn't come here searching for one. My advice is insanity will kill you quicker than anything else will. Turn off the news you have running for 24 hours- watch it, stay updated, but don't let it become your hobby. Create. Write. Read. Learn some magic, pick up a language, pick up your room! Look at what the Egyptians did with time, they built pyramids. Use this time now to build some kind of foundation in whatever part of life you need structure. In a time with too much and too little of it take the time to run from our bias, our hatred, our guilt. We are living in an episode with no pilot to tell us where the season will go. The world is plagued right now, don't add to it. 

Stay safe, stay sane, stay sanitized, stay sheltered. Because one of these days I'd like to leave my home. 

The Below video via Youtube is George Martin's "Sea of Time"