Dear 2020,

How are you? How were you, maybe? I’m kinda new at writing to the past. But if my memory serves me, the answer is…pretty terrible. I liken you to the sensation of peeling off a toenail. Or three. Or maybe you’re more akin to the inexplicably sweaty smell that lingers in the iLab. You were a real Debby Downer any way you slice it. Still, it’s been a whole two years. Perhaps you deserve a little recognition.

Everyone remembers where they were when the Towers fell. I imagine that it’s the same case for the spring of 2020. I was but a wee freshman navigating the rolling tides of that ocean we call high school. We’d gotten word of some mysterious Wuhan virus that had thrown the world into a panic. But that mysterious Wuhan virus was exactly that: a mysterious Wuhan virus. It couldn’t touch us. Definitely not in this lifetime. Then it reached the States. And then the city. And then it was all over Westchester. Before I’d figured out where I could find that elusive high school pool, we were thrust onto Zoom. For those two weeks immediately after we shut down, though, I’ll admit that those changes were kind of welcome. It was an early spring break. Or a third winter break. And Wellness Week, remember that? Shakespeare’s Sonnets? ¿Pan con tomate? Those were the times. Not that they were particularly good, because they weren’t. They were Scarsdale’s best tries at slapping together a remedy for a situation that was egregiously, incredibly, and criminally sucky.

I say ‘criminally,’ because, in a way, remote instruction was a robbery, was it not? We were robbed. And losing class time, I think we can agree, was not the most significant loss. But for you few intellectually curious, well, maybe it was. Thirty-minute periods at inconsistent intervals did next to nothing for our incessant hunger for knowledge. Our days were rolling out of bed (if that), flipping open our laptops, and staying muted for maybe two or three classes. The greatest loss, though, was motivation. Grades were at no risk of slipping since, again, Zoom school. It wasn’t a struggle to study, it was a struggle to want to study. I guess that’s always true. But studying, more than I’d like to admit, grants a sense of gratification after you take a real test. That means not a copy-pasted assessment with the answers on a Quizlet. My only mood was gray – lazy, lethargic gray. Weeks and weeks congealed into the end of the wet blanket that was my freshman year.

With those two months of summer, we started to get our stuff together. Sort of. Because 2020-2021 was the nothing year. It flew by in an ugly hurricane of elections, plastic shields, cohorts, QR codes and drivers’ permits. I don’t think it was a bad year. It definitely wasn’t the opposite. It was just…flavorless. Nothing special. But things were looking up, or, at the very least, somewhat sideways. Everyone started getting their first Fauci Ouchies. Masking was temporarily optional when you were outside. Yet the disdain we all felt for returning to in-person classes was a symptom of that springtime hibernation. And asynchronous Wednesdays? My God, asynchronous Wednesdays. 

Jumpcut to March 25, at 11:34 PM, when I’m writing this sentence: things are different. Sneezing or coughing doesn’t earn you pointed glances. You can walk without the fear of breaching anyone’s six-foot protective radius. Oh, and you don’t need a mask anymore. That’s pretty wild. What this trainwreck of two years has given us is time. Time to yearn for 50 minute periods. Time to realize that the word “unprecedented” has become anything but. And I’m old now. I’m more than halfway done with being a junior. I’m going to be applying to college in the fall of this year, assuming none of us get drafted for that mess in Ukraine. I’m almost, like, a legal adult. Yet, in a lot of ways, I still feel like that drowning freshman from 2019. I’m still not sure who they hired to number the classrooms at SHS. I’m still somewhat vertically challenged. And I’m gonna take my first high school finals this year— unless we get hit with some AlphaGammaSigmacron variant come May. Knock on wood. You, 2020, are going to be a blemish in the history books of the future. Or maybe they won’t even care about this awkward two-year stretch of the 21st century’s teenage phase. I wouldn’t mind that.

Goodbye forever,

Mason

Where is that damn pool?