“When I was on flight back home to Miami, I had assumed I would only be home for about three weeks. UCLA had announced classes would resume April 10th. I had packed a pair of jeans, a pair of shorts, four t-shirts, a weeks worth of underwear. When my flight landed, my phone was buzzing with texts, voicemails, phone calls all saying the same thing; “did you read the email?” My heart sank in my chest when I received an email from UCLA reading, “we have decided to continue to offer instruction remotely through the end of the spring quarter.” What did this mean for the rest of my senior year? What did this mean for the friendships I had built over the past four years? What did this mean for our graduation ceremony? My mind felt like a wasp nest, shaken gently enough by a toddler to create chaos. There I sat, as the plane taxied into the gate, quietly sobbing. My senior year, my senior moments stolen. I was comforted by a stranger near by. She must have thought a relative died or a boyfriend broke up with me via text. The drive home from the airport was silent. My dad knew the confusion and frustration me and so many other college seniors were experiencing. The following days, after realizing my senior year had ended much too early, were filled with remembering my lasts and not recognizing them as such. If only I had known that that was my last time at Rocco’s, my last time flirting with a guy at some college party, my last time studying in the bookstacks at Powell library, my last time being able to really call LA home, I would have soaked up the image, the smells, the noises of it all. I would have appreciated that tired miserable look of so many students camping out in the libraries during exam week. I would appreciated the way my college roommate’s dinner sometimes smelled bad and didn’t have the heart to tell her. 

Perhaps, this is a positive thing coming out of the current crisis; realizing how moments, opportunities, dreams, and expectations can be ripped from you. Ultimately, we realize how vulnerable humans are, how little control we have over things that happen to us. In a sweet way, it reminds us to really remember the moments while they’re happening, to not forget the way someone’s cologne smells or the way small talk with a shopkeeper feels. We never know when a global crisis may happen and create distance between us and what feels like the distant past.”