The Floor: My New Happy Place By Julia Brukx

The floor:

By: Julia Brukx

It’s been a really long day. Hours upon hours spent shuffling from bed to desk in order to create some kind of difference between work and rest, only to be done with the day and feel no sense of relief. It’s 4 p.m. and already dark outside, microwaved food is getting old, and the assignments are piling up. The bed stands ready, warm and inviting with pillows and blankets already broken in from a full day of doing homework upon them. But instead, you choose to lie on the floor. The hard, barely carpeted, stomped upon and lovely floor. If you were a student in 2020, you probably felt an increase of stress, due to school, the pandemic, or life in general. Double masks and variants, gubernatorial scandals, a feeling of helplessness: there’s a lot going on, little of it that we can control, and it’s piling on with school and other responsibilities, such as work and family. Arlee Christian, a freshman at the University of Virginia, says, “Everything weighs down on me a lot more than it used to; I have very few outlets for all of my energy and thoughts.” Additionally, in many ways, it feels at times that we are expected to live a post-COVID life in a still-COVID world. Jobs still need to be done, deadlines still need to be met and online school is a difficult rhythm to fall into. Christian says, “I am more likely to miss or forget assignments because of the online nature of all my classes. I don’t usually ever want to go to class because everything feels repetitive.” And because the entire freshman class was not able to close out high school normally, being in college still feels strange at times, like we’ve slipped under the radar and somehow ended up at the next chapter before the last one ended. Emerson College freshman Aisling McDermott describes it being, “so hard to get back on track after not being in school for half a year.” When a schedule that would normally consist of darting from building to building with commutes and interactions with other students is replaced by deciding whether it is worth it to move from the bed to the desk for class, moving onto the floor can be the only change during long days indoors. Escapes of early quarantine, like walks around the neighborhood, have been replaced by ice-covered roads and cabin fever; it seems that we’ve even come full circle, moving from romanticizing a life before COVID to missing whipped coffee and Tiger King. McDermott describes

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largely unmissed is the commute. With school and work now online for many people, there is less time spent moving from place to place, no popping on a podcast or a favorite playlist while walking or driving to work. ere is no physical barrier between work and life, no time in between where you’re not expected to do anything but move. Most days, when I nish class, I just close the tab and continue with more homework. ere is no time spent in between just doing nothing. It is hard to work, hard to even look at your phone, but nothing is expected of you on the oor. It’s a place to just be, and can serve as a barrier between two tasks or two parts of the day. ere are plenty of places to sit — admittedly fewer now, since we can’t go anywhere, but it remains a primary purpose of desks, beds and couches. Lying on the oor is a rejection, a tiny act of rebellion to the expected. Entire industries exist to provide comfortable places to rest, and ignoring that is a way of shouting, “I can exist without you!” And since we can’t resort to usual escapes, such as parties or travel, lying on the oor may be the best we can do for now.

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