I look over to the time on the bottom right hand corner on my laptop screen: it’s 1:00 am Friday morning. Danny and I are on our usual weekly Zoom call, racing to finish our fluid mechanics and physiology problem sets. I groggily look up from my laptop to my much bigger second monitor to see Danny holding up his lined sheet close to his camera so that I could attempt to interpret the blurry numbers and letters on my screen.
“Bro, I can hardly see what you wrote down,” I say as I squint at my screen.
“I’m trying, I’m trying,” Danny responds as he readjusted his paper position, moving it back and forth.
“Dude Zoom sucks! This would’ve taken us half the time if we were sitting next to each other at the Dude,” I annoyingly reply as I creep up to my screen, feeling the tip of my nose kiss the screen.
“Yea, I know man, all cause of COVID. Screw corona.”
Finally, Danny’s camera focuses on his work and I copy it down just fast enough before the numbers diminish back into a sea of pixels on my screen. But I couldn’t let this conversation on coronavirus end there: I was exhausted and tired because of the insane amount of work that I’ve been putting in for my classes thanks to COVID and I needed to get my daily coronavirus rant out of my system.
“Exactly, this was supposed to be our senior year. I’m supposed to be chilling with you and the guys, but instead, we’re stuck inside and when we meet up, we have to wear those damn masks. What kind of ‘college experience’ is that!” I exclaim.
“Yea man, that’s tough. So glad that Trump ruined the glory of our senior year,” Danny replies sarcastically.
“If only Trump was more competent than a goddamn potato, this mess could’ve ended a long time ago.”
We both crack up a bit at my joke, but the feeling of laughter couldn’t mask the emotions bottled up inside of me.
“Ayo, did you hear Hope Hicks got infected?” Danny asks.
“Yea I did. And honestly… I’m hoping that Trump gets infected and suffers the way two hundred fucking thousand people have because of his complete incompetence.”
“Jeez man, that’s a lot,” Danny comments. “But yea I totally get where you’re coming from. Alright, let’s finish up this last problem so we can be done.”
***
It’s 1:45 am now, and me and Danny finally hopped off our Zoom call. I power off my laptop, slowly get myself out of my chair, drag my feet along the carpet to my bathroom, put some Colgate fresh mint toothpaste on my pink toothbrush, and go to town on my teeth. I pull out my phone and look through Apple News one last time before head to bed. And then I read: “Trump diagnosed with COVID-19 according to statement on his Twitter account.” Next thing I know, I’m feel a sense of justice and happiness that Trump finally got what he deserved after all the crap he’s pulled. As I got back to swirling my toothbrush in mini circles across my teeth, I begin to reflect deeper on Trump’s diagnosis. Did I just feel happiness after hearing a 74-year old elderly man got diagnosed with COVID-19? But it’s not just any elderly man, it’s Donald Trump. I wash my mouth one last time, trudge back to my room, and jump into my soft memory foam bed with my body ready to drift to sleep but my mind still fighting whether I really should’ve reacted the way I did.
***
Ugh. My alarm goes off, with its annoyingly loud ring echoing in my ears. I reach up to grab my phone, missing it a couple of times before sliding it across my nightstand into my left hand. Still hardly awake, I press the snooze button and attempt to read the time and realize that it’s 11. I’ve overslept again. Luckily, I remember that I have no class today. As I became more self-aware, I hear my stomach growl at me and decide to get out of bed.
I head to the kitchen with my hair in a mess, grab an everything bagel, my go-to quick breakfast, slice it in half, and put it in the shiny new toaster that I bought for the house. As the bagel crisps up, I grab some cream cheese from the fridge, which was basically empty except for one piece of steak, and the TV remote from the sofa in the living room. I press the on button, and which brought me to CNN’s coverage of Trump’s diagnosis, with the breaking news in bold “Trump transported to Walter Reed Hospital.” All of a sudden, I feel a wave of guilt rush as I remembered the events of the night before: how I had wished for Trump to be infected, how I hoped he would suffer, how I celebrated when I first heard the news. How could I have said all of that, how could I have felt that? The bagels pop out of the toaster, waking me from the trance state I was in. I pick the bagel pieces out with my fingertips to avoid burning my fingers and begin to spread cream cheese on them. As I finally take a seat at the kitchen counter and take my first big bite, I sit and stare at the TV, not watching the news but rather pondering on the principles that I thought made me who I am.
***
I learned the value of all life early on from my parents. In one of my earliest memories, I remember one of the scariest creatures I’ve ever seen staring at me from on top of the blue and white checkered blanket on my bed. “DAD!!!!”
Like any other kid, I was yelling because I was scared of the black spider, the size of my six-year old thumb, sitting on my bed. I quickly grabbed the biggest book I could find as my dad ran to my room. I gave him the book him and pointed to the spider, with my hand shaking. He took the book, calmly put it back into my bookshelf, and said with a smile, “You should never to hurt another living thing if you don’t have to. Let me show you how to take care of this.” He grabbed a tissue from the tissue box sitting on my nightstand and gave it to me. He wrapped it so it would be easier to hold and gave it to me. “Hold it out, let it crawl onto the tissue. Then let it go outside.”
I, still trembling, decided to heed his advice. I held out the tissue, and after 10 seconds, all eight legs of the spider’s legs were all on the tissue. Then, I screamed and ran as fast as I could out of my room, through the patio doors, and jumped towards the fresh mown grass and held my arm out downwards so that the spider crawl onto our lawn. After 20 seconds of whining that the spider might crawl up my arm and eat me alive, the spider was gone. Thinking back now, if I was the threatening-looking spider, I would’ve been happy that a human chose to give me life instead of smother me under a heavy book.
When it comes to people, I have taken up a similar principle: to never wish ill or bring harm upon another person. In fact, believing in this value of life, I was persuaded that becoming a doctor was the career path for me.
So, if I supposedly believe in this principle, why am I seemingly wishing for Trump’s death? Even if he is an incompetent racist baboon who is responsible for the deaths of thousands during this pandemic, I shouldn’t be hoping for his death. So where does that leave me: am I a terrible person? All the ideals that I’ve been taught, have I never really internalized them? I always thought that I was a decent person, but I’m not sure anymore.
***
It’s Saturday now. I’ve chosen to ignore my thoughts from the day before; I know thinking about it more is only going to bring my mood down. I’m just starting to practice for my first presentation in for senior design that’s coming up on Tuesday. As I’m midway through my script, my phone starts buzzing, and I flip it from its face down position so I can reject the call since I need to be in the zone to finish prepping for this presentation. As I’m a few millimeters from hitting the red reject button, I notice it’s my dad who’s calling. I couldn’t reject this call. My dad lives in Saudi Arabia nowadays, so talking with him is tough since he’s generally sleeping when I’m free to talk with him and I’m in class when he’s free to talk. I quickly stop myself and shift my finger to the left and press the green accept button.
“Hey dad! How are you doing?” I say excited to see him again, although he doesn’t seem as excited as me.
“Fine. How’s school?” he replies with what is most definitely a frown on his face.
“I’m drowning in work, but I’m surviving for now.” At this point, I remember that my dad was supposed to hear back from a possible job opportunity back in the States. He’s been trying to find a job in the US for a while, and he finally got a lead.
“So, did you hear back from that interview you had on Monday?” I asked.
“Yes,” he answered grimly.
“And…?”
“And nothing. They said fucking no.” I’ve never heard my dad drop the f-bomb with me. He told me to not curse throughout my childhood; unfortunately, that lesson never worked out, but he’s never gone against his own teachings. This can’t be good.
“Dad, are you sure you’re okay?” I ask nervously.
“Of course not. I’m tired of being here alone. Any opportunity that comes by, I get the same bullshit response ‘your wages are too high to match in the States.’ And now it’s even worse cause of this corona shit and Donald Trump. What am I supposed to do? Live here without my family, working for the rest of my life just to provide for my family! I can’t even come see you guys because of corona. At least those made this sacrifice bearable. So no I’m not okay!” I look back at my dad on my small five-inch screen, with my jaw dropped in total shock. I had no idea my dad had the capacity to blow up like this; he generally has tremendous self-control over his emotions. I spend the next 30 seconds trying to come up with something to say to comfort him. I hardly squeak out something, but I’m not sure it helped him, and as I did my best to calm him down, in the back of mind, I was contemplating whether this single job rejection really caused my dad to lose control.
***
It’s late afternoon on Sunday. I’ve wrapped myself in my favorite grey fluffy blanket because, for some reason, my room is cold. I’m furiously typing away to finish an assignment for my circuits lab. Then, I heard my phone buzz, rumbling my desk a bit. I look to see who’s texting me, and I find that my friends are texting in our chat, “Da Bubble,” appropriately named because we decided to create a mask-free bubble among ourselves. I check to see what the fuss is, and my friend Calvin wrote “WTF! Trump’s already leaving Walter Reed.” I immediately switch apps to see Apple News has to say, and there it is, Trump is leaving Walter Reed. Then, I start to feel disappointed, because he got healthy so quickly when many others hadn’t. However, this time I believe there has to be more to how I feel: I tried to look within myself, past the emotions from the fact that I can’t meet up with friends properly, that I can’t travel outside the walls of my house without a mask, that I can’t get a real college experience, and I think: good for Trump. I look back at my phone, which is still vibrating away. I see my friend Rob say “Damn, Trump doesn’t deserve this ending, he should be suffering.” I quickly see three thumb-up reactions on Rob’s message. I think back to what my principles are: all life deserves to be treated with respect and how I truly feel about the situation. As I type out my response carefully, letter by letter, word by word, till my phone reads “Whether Trump deserves it or not, we shouldn’t be wishing ill upon anyone guys. We wouldn’t want anyone to do that with us.” Yes, I think to myself, behind these emotions, this is who I really am. So maybe I’m not that shitty of a person, maybe it’s just corona doing the talking.
Anonymous | October 2 – 4, 2020 | Ann Arbor, MI