I FELL accustomed to the deafening silence of mornings. The cold air nipping on my skin makes me rise from the night’s restlessness, I sit upright and curl up my legs such that they meet my chest. My eyes tightly shut as they try to squeeze in more time into ‘rest,’ or what was left of it. Fingers danced across my phone as I startled it awake, and it replied by streaming rays of light into the darkness of my room. I drag myself off the comfort of my bed with the little energy I obtained from the night.

Coffee seems to be the only thing that is consistent with my previous life, but it no longer had the same function that it had before. I used to think of coffee as a companion, but now I think of it as a commodity and a reminder that I have to push myself to go to a job that I do not necessarily want to work in. I order on my phone a couple of meters away from the shop. Contactless. I pick it up from the counter after checking the label for my name. No exchanges of speech with anyone. 

I was told of the concept of post-graduation blues, but I never thought I would go through it. I had it all planned out, more or less, not in detail but the gist of how life would look like through my 20s. Then, just like the rest of the world’s plans… a startling halt. Everything happened unexpectedly, the world became even more confusing, and life became more messed up than it was before.

I no longer wait at the table in my corner of the coffee shop since I am over 2,355 km away from it, but I still do wait for familiar people in front of my screen. I can no longer reach out and hug them if they are in tears, or shush them if they scream excitedly and disturb others who are working around us. All I can keep constant from that old space was that I provided my time.

Right before graduation, a friend of mine talked about time slowing down so that we can enjoy or figure out the things that were happening at a pace that we can understand. The concept of time is something that a lot of people have played with, tried to grasp but never could master. I have labeled the past year as, “the year when everything happened but where nothing happened.” In this case, we have postponed many of our plans to ‘next time,’ but a year into this whole thing and we are no longer sure when it will come.

The thing that is amusing about time is that it strikes a balance between predictability and spontaneity. One can predict or estimate a certain occurrence to happen at a certain time frame, but one could never foreshadow an unprompted sequence of events. So in the span of the year, some may have found solutions to continue plans, while others may have had to completely tear their blueprints and start from scratch. In this situation, I am the latter and am learning to take a few steps backward due to feeling stagnant by forcing a blueprint with the wrong dimensions into a new space.

 The understanding that I am now working towards a different reality and moving in an unknown space terrifies me. With this comes the human tendency to compare oneself with peers and frustrating yourself that you’re being left behind. However, in reality, we could be stuck in a gap of time, just to take a moment to be still. Each one has their own blueprint in life, never can we know where those gaps are and we could be moving as much as the next person—just on a different path. So whilst being immersed in our every day, where life feels so similar and dull, it actually changes us secretly.

So again I come home and toss my mask in the bin. I jump in the shower and after, trudge my way into my room. This is now the reality of my everyday life. I pen down how I feel in my journal and I guess it was different even if it was as monotonous as the day before. I crawl back into the covers and slowly figure out the next step to take.

Bianca Mae R. Aragones (BS PSY ‘20) was The GUIDON’s Human Resources Manager for AY 2019-2020. She may be reached at aragonesbianca.rcy@gmail.com.