How Covid-19 Changed My Senior Year

It was March 12, 2020 and I was sitting in English class. We were currently studying Macbeth. I was dozing off due to last night's intense basketball practice. The buzzer went off on our PA system that my high school had.

"Good morning students", the principal said, "due to the ongoing crisis of Covid-19, all sports will be cancelled until further notice". I looked around the room and we all had the same disbelief on our faces. All of us thinking, "this can't happen", "it's our last year", or "why us?". My provincials was supposed to happen the 17 of March. Just a week from now. Instead, it was all cancelled.

Later that day, they cancelled our upcoming semi-formal. Our last semi-formal. The only thing I could think was, "damn, at least I didn't buy a ticket yet".

That weekend we had Monday off, due to a PD day. I went over to my boyfriend's house to chill for the day. Where I live in Canada, we currently had no cases so everything was okay. Our school district was going to come on the news as provinces like Ontario and Alberta were shutting down schools. Nothing bad could happen because we have no cases, right? So wrong.

2:30 rolls around and the Minister of Health is on the news. School is closing, and for good. I could not come up with an explanation for why they were closing school. Why we were not quick enough to catch the virus. We had so much time. But as a high school student, sadly, I do not have the power to make decisions like that.

My friends were texting me non-stop. Our seniors group chat was going wild. No graduation. No prom. No exams. Will we get into university? Who knows. The last 12 years of my life spent in high school, working my butt off for what? This?

Needless to say I was more disappointed than anything. Disappointed that we still had no cases but we had to go to these extremes. You can say I'm being selfish but you cannot deny the time we had to solve this siuation. I am not going to say where I live for security matters, but the time we had to solve the problem, was weeks in advance. We should have closed down our airports and travellars as soon as this occured. But people said, "No, I have family abroad", or "it's related to work". But this pandemic could have been stopped. We were just too slow.

As I sit in my bed typing this, I wonder what I would have been doing if I was in school. I think I would've been in French this morning, packing up my bag to head to the next class, yeah that sounds right.

I also wonder, will I graduate? Will I get to dance in the $700 dress I bought? Will I get my reward for my hard earned work? No one knows.

This is a terrible time, don't get me wrong. I don't wish this on nobody and I wish we did try and stop it weeks in advance but we didn't. I hope everyone is staying inside and staying safe. If not, do this for the Frontline Workers.

To conclude this story, this is not how I expected my Senior Year to go. In September, as I sat at Cora's with all my friends on the first day of school, this is not how we planned it. But I guess it will go down in history as "The Class of 2020, Pandemic Graduates".