By Maria Rodriguez
My life towards the end of 2021 was a blast. It was preeminent! It was a revival of once dead hopes and dreams.
But as I ponder more on what my life may be like in the arrival of 2022, I am filled with more fear and sadness than hope. Weighed down with the realization that goodbyes and possibly tear-filled farewells are part of what’s to come in the new year.
That too was what I thought about the early months of 2020. And look what happened. Back then, New Year and Christmas were quite a routine. I knew that things would just be comfortably the same, with a few upgrades as time goes by. But after 2020, my mind became intermittently stagnated by the possibility of my life-changing in a tragic, but not exactly life-threatening way. Letting go of 2020’s last moments was easy —- discarded like a piece of trash that I felt sure had no treasures. In the last moments of 2020, I even wrote a personal end-of-the-year essay entitled “Wake Me Up When It’s All Over.” I just wanted the pandemic to end.
In the writing of that essay, I was so mad at “Time” —- the year 2020. For starting as a year so sweet and promising, then ending with something akin to a betrayal about one-fourth through.
And so, after a year of sporadic contemplation, I begin to find it ironic that I hated “time” for what it took from me, but forgot what it gave. I hated the pandemic for taking away my golden years and golden memories. I hated (and unfortunately, honestly still hate) it for stealing my youth’s time of bloom. That anger often fueled teary nights and raging stomps. But hopefully, it will continue to die down. For the best years of my life, I would say that the last months were their prime. For, everything I started and worked toward to has come. It was there right in front of me. For me, that’s what the last months of 2021 feels like.
We formed bonds that wouldn’t have room to grow and develop if it weren’t for the pandemic. But don’t get me wrong, we mustn’t let such an overreaction happen again.
We all make mistakes, which we are meant to learn from. And as humanity stumbles and falls, we can still find rainbows in the sky and flowers that grow. With 2021, I formed a friendship with someone who’s always been there but rarely talked to. If the pandemic didn’t happen, I don’t know how we would’ve become friends.
These past few years have been a euphoric nightmare.
As we go through years of growing pains and easy games, along the way, we would wish for a more youthful part of our past selves to come back and help us become who we’ve always been. Some parts of us stay til the end, while most have to be parted within a bittersweet goodbye. Only to be reminded of, but not lived through.