I posted on my Facebook story John William’s “Leaving Hogwarts,” one of the soundtracks for the Harry Potter series, as I left UP Diliman on the afternoon of March 10, 2020. I superimposed the word “Diliman” over “Hogwarts” as a homage to Quezon City Mayor Joy Belmonte’s declaration of class suspension just the night before.

I can’t help but laugh at how eerily normal that day was. And by “normal,” I’m referring to how similar it seemed to the days and weeks before that mid-March week that upended everything we knew of our comings and goings.

March 9, 2020, was a Monday. I think I’ll never forget that day because it was the schedule of the second long exam for Math 22. I fatally flunked my first long exam (I only got one-third of the total points), so I was looking forward to the next exams to improve my grades. Anxiously, I spent most of that day holed up in my dorm room, trying to memorize the formula and characteristics of the various tests for convergence.

The exams began at around 5 p.m. in the cold Math building auditorium. (Spoiler: I flunked the exam, again.) Some students were already wearing masks, an ominous sign. After the exam, I ran to Sampaguita Dorm to attend our weekly Collegian news section meeting. Of course, we talked about COVID-19 and the rumors of class suspensions, lockdowns, and the possibility of Martial Law (all of which eventually became true, except for the last one, which was already de facto declared).

But aside from that fear-mongering chatter, everything else was normal. The office was teeming with people. Other sections were meeting, as well. We lined up topics for the next print edition as if the world wasn’t about to grind to a halt. We had our usual fast-food dinner (the norm, except for Wednesday nights). By 9 p.m., I arrived at my dorm, and before midnight, Mayor Joy announced the class suspension, following President Rodrigo Duterte’s earlier declaration. My roommates immediately planned their departure, thinking that a one-week vacation was ahead of us.

I planned to stay, hoping that the 24 local cases of the then-novel coronavirus would eventually fizzle out. Yet I decided to leave at my parents’ urging, lest I risk being stranded once lockdowns were imposed. 

The following day, March 10, I went back to the Collegian office to retrieve some of my belongings. In the skewed time zone of the Collegian, 7:30 a.m. was still early. The fire exit door was still firmly latched, so I had to bang gently on the door so Sheila could hear me. Bea was lying on the cardboard-matted floor, Marvs was on the single-seater couch, and Chard was on the patched-up black couch. I grabbed my things, careful not to make a noise. I quickly left. Until now, that was the last time I saw them in person.

I fled UP Diliman. My exit wasn’t really interesting as I just hitched my ride home with my partner, taking a train ride to Taft first, maskless (a risky move, considering how quickly the virus was spreading then). I got home past midnight, March 11, after nearly a 10-hour trip.

In the early days of the pandemic, we expected the outbreak to be contained in a week or two, and life would resume. Even the Collegian had difficulties accepting the grim outlook that week: We still held meetings for the student council elections coverage and planned for our weekly releases. For our first online meeting, I remember we used Google Meet because no one knew how to use Zoom yet.

I used to be hopeful that the restrictions would eventually go away and life would return to its pre-March 10 state. But in the days since I left campus, it’s seemed like our situation got only progressively worse. And now, the thought of ending the pandemic has gone away: The government’s rhetoric is now about the so-called new normal or how to “live with COVID.”

Frankly, that optimism is dead. When someone asks me when we will hold face-to-face classes again, I answer them with either a nod or a shrug. It has simply been hard to keep an optimistic outlook after two years of national trauma and anxiety. Yet I keep holding onto those recollections because they remind me that there used to be a time when life had a semblance of fluidity, unlike now when everything seems to depend on what a barely intelligible president would decree every two weeks.

So, at least for now, I’ve been forced to contend with what’s in front of me. In the two years that passed, I survived the Math 20 series, ascended the Collegian’s staff box, and began my undergraduate research work. Managing those tasks means bookmarking an awful lot of journal articles that I’ll never read, answering an unending deluge of problem sets, and editing (and sometimes, writing) drafts—until the wee hours of the morning—just to make sure we meet our deadlines.

Maybe our lives wouldn’t return to what it was. Perhaps, aspects of this pandemic lifestyle will somehow assimilate into whatever’s in the uncertain future. Possibly, we’re condemned to this isolation misery. But, in these times, it’s both reassuring and calming to recall how our life was, just two years ago. ●