11th January 2025
She stepped out of her office with a frown because they were closing it early for maintenance. She tightened her ponytail, took a deep breath and walked towards the Metro station. She has never seen how the outside world looks like at 8 PM, as she always steps out at 11 PM to avoid the crowd.
She felt like today would be the day to face her fear. She got herself a one-way ticket and proceeded to walk towards her platform. A train had just arrived and all the passengers rushed out to catch their next train and reach home quick to spend time with their families. She suddenly felt like the air was taken out of her system and felt light-headed. Everything became a blur. The people looked like zombies walking towards her to eat her alive. She rushed to a wall where no one was standing. She slowly slid down the wall and pulled her knees close to her chest. She buried her head into it and started weeping.
The flashbacks of 2020 clouded her mind. As her hands were quivering, she reached out to her phone from her jacket and thought if she should call her family. She couldn’t do it as she has already put them through a lot during her recovery period. If they knew she is still getting these flashbacks, she would have to go back to the hospital.
She instructed herself to think of happy things like flowers, butterflies and her life before 2020. She thought it wasn’t nice to have a mental breakdown in the middle of a metro station and picked herself up. She wiped her tears and untied her messy ponytail that merely had any strand of hair in it because of the excessive tugging a few minutes back to clear her head.
She decided to text her parents that she would be late for dinner. They were used to her coming late on the days she went to her office, so they agreed. She stood there, silently praying that the crowd thins out quickly. She thought it would be a good idea to wait for two hours instead of going through another breakdown. She plugged in her headphones and listened to her favourite playlist. There she stood against a grey wall, listening to music and waiting for a train that isn’t crowded. To the world, she looked like a normal young woman. Only her friends and family knew all that she went through in the past four years.
Jenny Liz Taylor, a 22-year-old content writer, was traumatized by events that happened in the year 2020. Though it happened four years ago, she couldn’t forgive the virus or herself for not being able to go to a college. She was tested positive for Covid-19 after Unlock 2.0 and it affected her tremendously. At the end of all the lockdowns, she became paranoid of large crowds. She couldn’t get herself to forget it though vaccines came. She refused to go to public places and, after a while, her parents stopped trying because of her hysterical tantrums. They sought after therapists to help her, but the flashbacks kept coming back to her.
She couldn’t go on living without anything to do. So after a year of suffering, she decided to find a job that didn’t require a degree and had less interaction with people. She relied on online courses and buried herself in books to learn more. She works from home and, once a week, she has to go to the office to meet her team lead. She doesn’t get out of the place till it becomes deserted enough to step out.
Three words that always run in her mind are, Claustrophobic, Social distancing and 2020. Even the brightest of days can’t get rid of the gloominess that 2020 holds in her heart.
The J World 