Inspiration Words: Decide and Resentment
Ellie always sang while she got ready for class, and now she had music on almost constantly. Music felt like the only escape from this small apartment. It hadn’t seemed so small when she moved in two years ago, but after spending the last seven days in lockdown, she had finally decided that it was small. She glanced out the window as her recent favorite song from the movie Tangled started playing: “Seven a.m., the usual morning line-up. . .”
She checked her watch and paused the music—time to join the online zoom class. She opened the zoom room and sent the password to her students. She greeted them as they joined the chat room, but once several students joined, they turned off their microphones and cameras, and she was left to just wait for the class to start.
She opened her textbook and tried to generate energy to share the lesson with her students while staring at random profile pictures. There were a few Chinese celebrities, cartoon characters, backs of heads, and occasionally, a Western face. Few students used their own faces in their profile pictures, so she only knew who they were by the English name next to the muted microphone icon.
“Today we’re going to talk about shopping!” Ellie hoped her voice didn’t sound as fake as it felt. For the fourth time that week, she plodded through the vocabulary and some warm-up questions, staring at those meaningless profile pictures that had become all she knew of her students. This class was particularly hard because she had never met these students, and she couldn’t quite figure out how to teach them. Are they too shy to answer the questions? Am I talking too fast? Do they all have a bad internet connection? Are they just lazy? The questions played through her mind on repeat as she waited for someone to type an answer to her question into the group chat.
Thankfully I only have one class today. But this thought left Ellie feeling even more discouraged. She used to love class. Even before Covid-19, she had enjoyed going to class every day, but after a whole semester of online classes, she was thrilled to go back to regular classes. They were lucky enough to have had regular classes for a full year after the virus first arrived in 2020, but now there was another outbreak in her city, and they were in lockdown again. Ellie plodded through her days just trying to find things to do in the solitude of her apartment.
At 9:50 a.m., she wished her students a good day and closed the Zoom room. Some classes told her thank you and sent her nice messages in the chat at the end of class, but today, only one student bothered to say anything. The rest signed out quickly, leaving Ellie to wonder what they had to do in their lives that was so pressing.
She hit play on the music, and as the familiar melody played again, she decided to join Rapunzel with the chores, sweeping her floor for the third time that week. She glanced at her bookshelf. She hadn’t been back to America since she first arrived in Xi’an (ssee-ahn), and she had only brought a couple of books with her. Was it time to “reread the books” just as Rapunzel had done? She certainly had time to spare. Maybe she could call her parents or Grandma? Probably not, it was already getting pretty late over there.
Ellie climbed onto the window seat and stared out the window. “And I’ll keep wonderin’ and wonderin’ and wonderin’ and wonderin’ when will my life begin.” Mandy Moore’s voice merged with her own as she stared at the intersection down below. Almost no cars waited at the red light, and Ellie found herself missing the blaring horns that she had finally managed to tune out.
She stuck her head out the window and closed her eyes. She tried to pretend that she was on the top of a mountain, surrounded by grass and flowers and trees. She struggled to remember the smell of nature, and the feel of grass under her toes. That was one thing she had over Rapunzel—at least she knew what grass felt like, but that almost made the confinement more unbearable. She looked down to the bottom of the apartment building, all nineteen floors below her. She really was up in a tower.
She spotted a delivery man by his bright yellow uniform with the large yellow box on the back of his bike. What should I cook for lunch today? Or should I order takeout? I’m sick of egg sandwiches, but everything else takes so much effort to make.
Ellie scrolled through a few delivery options on her Mei Tuan (may twahn) app, but she still hadn’t quite gotten the hang of the delivery system, and there still seemed too much Chinese for her comfort. Buying vegetables was a little bit easier. But what to make? Ellie didn’t really enjoy cooking, not like her sister did, and even though she had learned a few dishes during the 2020 quarantine, she just didn’t feel motivated to cook this week.
Ellie’s gaze drifted back to the city outside her window. This isn’t what I signed up for. Ellie tried to push it away, but she felt a tiny seed of resentment. The trouble was she wasn’t even sure who she was mad at. She wanted to be mad at Covid-19, but that was just a virus. Was she mad at God? She didn’t want that, but why didn’t He take away this miserable virus? Was she mad at China? How could she be mad at a country for trying to protect its people, even if this lockdown did seem a bit extreme? She stared at a distant tree. When will my life begin . . . again . . .