It is now day – I don’t know – of this quarantine, and I went from having two jobs to now only having one because of the city shutting down.  Sadly, I still have to go to the city for my other job. Being in the city during a time like this is scary. 42^nd Street has turned into a complete ghost town.

Usually, when I’m leaving work, I have to walk through a bunch of tourists. Now, I am the only one on the block. Trains are empty with a minimum of four people per car. Each person keeps a great distance from the next and all are wearing face masks and gloves.

When the virus started to affect the United States, no one took it seriously. Students saw that there were a bunch of cases in Westchester and started a petition to close school.

Everyone was excited to go home and start spring break early, but what about the people who did not want to go home? Yeah, an extra week of spring break did not sound too bad until it was extended.

This year is my senior year and it just all came to a sad end. If I would have known that the Tuesday we got the emails was going to be the last time I was going to be on campus, I would have done more. I would have hugged my friends bigger, I would have stayed a little longer, I just would have spent that day differently.

I only have work two days a week, so that means the rest of the week I am stuck in the house going crazy. I am the only one out of my siblings who lives there, so I am basically by myself. My parents are either sleeping or in their own world.

I went from being against Tik Tok, to posting a new video every day. School was my reason to be out of the house. It was my outlet and now I feel like a prisoner in my own house.

All I seem to do is sleep. Homework, as easily accessible as it is right now, I don’t have the right mindset to tackle. I can’t focus in my house, there are too many distractions.

I miss my friends, I miss being on campus, I miss the freedom of going outside. I didn’t sign up for online classes for a reason and now all of my classes are online. How do you participate in broadcast journalism online? Oh yeah, that’s right – you can’t. None of us were ready for this.

You would think since the world is going through a pandemic, professors would be more understanding. Classes went from being simple to 20-page essays every two days. This is horrible!

We had spring break early, $5 tickets to Cancun, and a chance to sleep in for a few days, but what now? None of us thought the semester would end. I know I didn’t.

This is not how I wanted to spend my senior year of college. I was really excited for the fashion show, the talent show, the Quill Awards, graduation. Everything just stopped out of nowhere.

The longer I stay in my house, the more I feel like I am losing my mind. At first, I was happy with the extra sleep, but now I am just over it. I want this to go back to normal, but that is not happening anytime soon.

I feel like even if things get better and they take care of the virus, things are not just going to go back to normal. Everyone is on social media, talking about all the things that they are planning to do after this is all over, but I don’t think they really will.

The fact that this virus has shut down our cities and that people are scared to blink in the same place as someone else, is not going to make it easy to jump back into interacting with each other the same way. Hugs are going to turn into head nods or fist bumps, bars and clubs may open back up but might not be packed for a while, and people are still going to walk around with their face mask and glove combo.

This quarantine is a drag now, but the real horror story is soon to come. I really feel it and I know we are not ready for it at all.