The truth is I never loved you. I know you tried your hardest to make me happy and to give me all you had. Your efforts to spoil me did not go unnoticed. You fell in love with me the first night I met you, but I’m sorry to say I never felt the same way. I don’t know if that makes me the bad guy or not. I don’t know if that defines me as someone who robs people of love. I tried to learn to love you, but I couldn’t get myself to do it.

Being in your 20s (and probably also 30s) is strange in many ways. The people in your friend groups are all at different stages. Some are focusing on travelling, some are working hard on building a career whilst others are starting to settle down. It can be a big contrast between some of you buying houses and some of you living alone in your rented flats. One of the biggest changes that'll happen during your friendship is some of you having children (of course not everyone decides to have kids). It's definitely something you need to adjust to, and here's a quick summary of my experience, as well as some advice.

I stood graveside with yellow daffodils, the national emblem of Wales, in honor of my mother-in-law Gertrude, deceased now for one-and-a-half years. I had tried to get my husband Alejandro to make a plan to visit her on Mother’s Day, but he said that he couldn’t bring himself to do it. And there I stood, not sure what to think of that, but I knew why I had come.

It is on this day. Today is the tenth day of July, in the year 2020. Today I am profoundly and acutely aware, and my eyes are assuredly wide open. My heart, nonetheless, is wrenched in pain.

Today is 08-July-2020...this is how we have to write dates in the research world. Starting over - work-mode off - Today is July 8th, 2020 and my day started off with a discussion that reminded us that everything happens for a reason. Pause - please do not escalate to a horrific scenario - I mean that certain events, such as this terrible COVID-19 pandemic, has allowed our Black Lives Matter movement come to light. If you were not sitting at home, either scrolling social media, watching TV, watching the news or doing any other activity to just feel like you are part of the world while trapped in your smaller world at home, you and everyone else may not have seen what has been going on in the world for far too long. Do you think that a protest with such dedication would have been possible if people were not at home wondering what to do next? We, the people, decided that we wanted to make a change! We were able to go out there and stand up for our fellow humans' humane rights. This is a humane crisis - not a political one.

The night before last night, I sat with my dad out on our back deck. It’s an old deck, but it has many memories, and often when things are hard, it’s where we find ourselves. This past weekend my dad and my brother built a shade cover type thing and attached Edison lights to it. It looks beautiful, its all-golden light, with none of the smoke of the previous lights which were tiki torches. The house rests behind the deck, and while we sat at the cast iron table, him with a beer, me without, we talked about a past I don’t remember. It’s the story of our house, my grandma Marie, and her husband Bill bought this house in the early days of their marriage. They had a ship’s toilet in the basement, and the master bedroom was down a long hall and to the right. I can almost imagine what it looked like back then.

The main difference between a house and a home is that a house is concrete. A house generally refers to a building in which someone lives. In contrast, a home refers to any location that a person thinks of as the place where they live and refer it to a place in which they love and have a family within.

Five feet, sixty inches is the distance teenager Stella lives her life by, organizing her medications, decorating her hospital room time after time again, living by every single rule made for her. The daily routine was the only familiar thing in her life until she met Will, another Cystic Fibrosis patient a couple of rooms down, he made her question the rules and believe there is life still outside of the hospital walls. Five Feet Apart was written by Mikki Daughtry, Rachael Lippincott, and Tobias Iaconis, published in 2018, it quickly became a favorite for readers because of the emotion, plot, character development, and real life struggles for CF patients that were brought to light.

Social distancing and isolation have shown me how important touch is for us. The simple ability to receive touch and touch someone we love was so natural pre quarantine that I am sure most of us took it for granted. The simple act of holding hands and being able to kiss someone we love without the virus lurking over is a feeling that I will personally be looking forward the most after quarantine is over. Thus, I believe that the days after quarantine are going to be defined not by the experiences that we missed out on, such as going to the beach or going to Starbucks, but by the ability to finally touch and hug those we love with complete freedom.

The sound of beeping machines and unrecognisable voices was all that I could hear, my eyesight was currently useless. I thought I was dead? I tried to move, nothing worked. Instead I lay there in absolute awe as my awareness slowly grows.

The lockdown has been tough on everyone. I'm referring to those in the first world countries who are experiencing a huge shift in lifestyle. It's no denying that we continue to adjust to this new normal that never seems to have an end.

The colours morphed into blue and purple with hues of pink, leaving him with a light-headed feeling in a supposed world that had no pauses. Soon these colours would slowly change back to a void and lonely black which would ultimately signal the unwelcome news that he was back to reality.