Kiki Grace, “Imagining in Isolation”

Imagining in Isolation

It was late spring and quickly turning into early summer. I wandered down stairs to my mom’s desk. My eyes were tired and my brain was sluggish. I had just completed one half of an online class day. I waited in the kitchen as my mom finished her conversation on the phone. “Aunt Mara is very scared of COVID, so we were talking about having the cousins stay with us this summer in Maine,” she told me after hanging up. I felt joy as I pictured us all living together, eating dinner on a picnic table, shadows of hydrangea flowers on the bright green grass. Wet toes, greasy corn on the cob hands, and crinkled tennis clothes. Chicken schnitzel sandwiches and wet bathing suits under sweaty hiking clothes. A campfire and a deck of cards. The six of us, Peter, James, Isabel, Teddy, JP, and I, we would sit on the porch, petrified as Teddy talked about outer space, the possibility of asteroids hitting the earth, and the collisions of energy, the process in creating the northern lights. The reappearing notifications on Google Classroom suddenly seemed as far as the other end of a blackhole, faint stars of galaxy’s elsewhere, and the beginning of time. “Yes,” I exclaimed. I ran back upstairs and prepared for finals. I could sense summer in the blasting AC of my room. My dog banged his head into the door and ran in, panting. My cat ran in after him, smelling the brink of summertime outdoors on his shaggy fur. My cat was an indoor pet, she ran to the window and gazed at the breeze brushing the trees. Leaves were removed like dry, dead hair. While adding final touches to my chemistry project, the topics of convection, temperature, heat capacity, and conductivity swirled in my brain. Beings of studious matter roamed my mind. I could not help but call Isabel and inform her of the plans. As we talked, a trail of coastline fog climbed a hill of pine trees, dodged a bike rack, and seeped through a blueberry bush. The murkiness rushed through the oak door of a shingled house. Spilling the fate of our COVID summer on a multicolored, multitasking circular rug: a dog bed, a door mat, a dance floor for Lizzo’s best hits, a movie night blanket, a flat scratch post for the cat, a bellow for the fireplace on a cold summer storm night. Suddenly, the door creaked, and I catched my brothers hovering. “Want to race the go-cart?” We were so bored in lockdown, so stuck in our home, we had repaired Razor scooters we hardly fit on anymore. Soon, I stood at the end of the driveway hill, at the part where our road meets the real road, with quick cars and walking neighbors. As I was in charge of determining the winner of this race, I sat at the end of the driveway and watched JP and Teddy race downwards. JP continued on the go-cart, zooming past me and into the road, as a car came flying down the road. “JP, stop!” Teddy exclaimed. “What are you doing, JP!” I yelled. The car stopped abruptly, meters away from crushing our brother. “Kiki, what are you doing? You were supposed to stop me,” he yelled, laughing.

My dad had been observing. “Are you crazy?” he asked. “Use your brakes!” We all laughed it off, but life could not have gotten any stranger at this point. JP was supposed to be at college in North Carolina, but he was in online school. Teddy was in his junior year, but he was preparing for college at his bedroom desk. I should have been at school lunch, but I spent my lunch break playing with a go-cart from my childhood. I longed for the days of Maine, where nothing ever changed, summer left off from the last summer, where I naively and ignorantly thought COVID could not reach us. Months of online school passed and blended into one. Spring turned into summer without causing any real attention. The non-academic days seemed normal, the usual excitement of vacation was introverted. Three weeks of June passed by, go-karts, skateboarding, and pickup basketball games. Exciting trips to Target were my only outfit changes. I visited some friends and we swam in the Long Island Sound. My brothers and I went fishing so often it became a routine. We played football together, we rode bikes together, we played street hockey together. Our home became an Olympics, and as the only players, competitions would get heated. We stole things from each other and rode away on the razor scooter. We chased each other, pranked each other, and annoyed each other. Somewhere in between the daily family dinners and unexpected water balloon strikes, we had enough. That is when the the Stupid Question List emerged. This would greatly change our COVID experience. The list was an outlet for unleashing and letting go of all of the irritants we were holding in, for the sake of the family. One night, we were sitting around the table in the kitchen. Harry, our dog, sat under my mom’s feet, the cat was chasing a fly. I was in charge of preparing dinner that night, so I ordered Chipotle. Most people had finished eating, JP is a slow consumer, and we were going over all of the stupid questions of the day. Teddy had written one down that I asked earlier. My mom stated it aloud and we all laughed. Taunting was a normal form of entertainment at dinner. We began to talk about Maine, about where we were each working, and about what islands we wanted to visit. I thought of warm rocks that made the perfect seat. I thought of dunking my head in the freezing cold, most-northern-east-coast-state-water. Isabel and I would snap our heads out of the water as fast as possible and shriek. We would run back onto the beach, squeeze lemon into our hair and sunbathe. I thought of tipping a 420 sailboat with my friends, we would later have a sleepover and make smoothies. The combination of apples, bananas, nutella, and ginger ale was our best creation yet. We would laugh, while fog climbed up a mountain, through a forest, and under a log, chasing a wild turkey farther inland. The low cloud would tower over our home and press against the window pane. It would cover us in a thick blanket, we could not see the outside, we could not see the sea. I imagined a normal summer, and high expectations were blinding.