When you’re stuck inside a place for weeks on end, it all begins to look the same. The colors begin to blur, and suddenly you see everything in grayscale. I mean it makes sense; you see the same things exclusively for weeks on end and everything becomes the same. There’s nothing to differentiate. You see it all day. You saw it all day yesterday. You’ll see it all day tomorrow. It’s kind of like how when you say a word enough, it loses meaning. When you see a place enough, it loses color.

When there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do, routine becomes a method of survival, but I’ve never been good at routine. 

Every morning I wake up at nine. 

I shower. 

I blow dry my hair and get dressed. I put varying degrees of effort into my appearance. 

Then I sit down and work on what needs doing. Schoolwork, mostly. 

When all that’s done, what do I do then? 

That isn’t a rhetorical question. I’m asking. What do I do?

My room is cleaner than it’s ever been. The other day in a fit of boredom I moved every single thing out of my room, vacuumed, and cleaned the carpets. I even used that carpet cleaning machine. I think they call it a carpet shampooer? That can’t be a word. The bottle of cleaner was called carpet shampoo. It was designed to deep-clean. As I ran the machine over my carpet, watching with fascination the tread marks it left and the change in color from beige to off-white, I couldn’t help but think how poetic it was. As the world suffers the consequences of the introduction of a deadly contamination, I clean my carpets. Contaminants out of my carpets. Contaminants into the world. My room smells like citrus, but the world reeks of sickness and death. Irony knows no bounds.