I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel.

            Scared – of course. My father ventures out in his paramedic uniform everyday where he sets up tents for the sick, for the dying. Scared that he even may end up as a patient in one of those tents.

            Angry. Angry that my last concert, my last prom, my only graduation, and other thresholds of my youth are being torn away from me. Angry that I won’t have glamorous stories about slow dancing in a blue gown to tell my kids.

            Alone. Alone in my house, in my bedroom, looking out my window to watch a world empty of people thrive with pink blossoms and lush, emerald trees. Alone in the confinement of four walls.

            I think I feel all these things. After all, it is what I’m supposed to feel, what everyone else is feeling as the threat of coronavirus worsens. By now, I’ve probably read thousands of news articles that turn the deaths of loved ones into a mass statistic, that tell me I will be spending my first semester of college online, that make me wonder if my father will be the next healthcare worker that crumbles under the pressure. Surely, I must be filled to the brim with numbers; I must be able to recite the death toll of America like a poem; I must be bursting at the seams with emotions of fury and rage and spine-tingling fear that my world will never be the same.

            Yet, I feel empty.

            In a time where I absorb more knowledge than ever on this virus, my mind is like the church on Easter morning this past week – a mind of unfilled pews and diminished thoughts.

            Why? Why during crisis does my mind grow blank, my heart turn weak? Perhaps it is the size of it all. No one has ever experienced anything like this pandemic, so the steps we take could translate to either a miracle or a tragedy tomorrow. Or, maybe it is the fact that we cannot control – nor place blame on – a virus. This infective agent, this inanimate thing that cannot feel love or hate or fear is now the dictator of our world. Some great wars in the past have started because of nuclear attacks or mass invasions, acts of anger and greed and rage, and this virus is microscopic. It’s smaller than anything, yet because of the power it contains, the world has come to a screeching halt. The things you’d never imagine happening, like Broadway going dark or March Madness being canceled has inevitably become a shocking reality, all because of an unemotional, inhuman virus.

            In this time where I should be feeling scared or angry or alone, I feel numb. I wake up at ten in the morning and miss going to school at seven o’clock, watching the sunrise meld together shades of magenta and blue as tiredness tugged at my eyes. I look out at my neighborhood and miss the traffic I’d face while driving; never before would I have considered the sound of honking vehicles a melody to my ears. I make a pot of coffee in my kitchen, and I miss the morning rush of Dunkin’, of smiling at employees and drinking the warmth of a latte in class. I do my schoolwork in bed under a city of blankets, and I miss being with students, doodling on the desks, hiding smirks from teachers, walking in bustling hallways, wearing jeans and sweaters, seeing friends and feeling the warmth of their smiles. I go to sleep and miss having something to look forward to the next day.

            There’s a lot of missing, a lot of small and seemingly useless things that I took for granted. Things I won’t be able to get back after this is over. Maybe it’s the deafening impact of that, of losing the tiny and unseen habits that thread my day together, that also leaves me empty-minded.

            Should I expect the emotions to crash over me like a tsunami wave, drowning me in tears and screams? Or should I prepare to feel this iciness in my heart forever? Perhaps many of you reading this feel this way, this numbing block in your mind that prevents the information you read to translate into emotions. To the best of my knowledge, I can answer with this: these times are unprecedented, and so are your emotions. There is no textbook, no online article that claims you should feel scared or angry or lonely during a pandemic. Maybe, like me, you know someone close that is working on the front line. Maybe you fear for their life and live in the uncertainty that today or tomorrow could be their last day at work. Or, maybe your loss is smaller but rightfully painful, like the cancellation of a graduation ceremony, where the line between your youth and adulthood is now blurred. Maybe you’ve lost your job, your only income torn away as bills stack up behind your door. Maybe tomorrow is a deeper spiral into a bottomless hole of terror, or maybe it is the glimmer of light at the end of a long and dark tunnel.

            There is one thing for sure: you are reading this, indicating that you are alive.

            Coronavirus has taken close to everything, dictating how many people we can be with or where we must work. As it holds a tight grip on your daily life, do not let it control the most vital, the most important, the most central thing to your mind and heart: your emotions. Do not let it convince you that being sad, or not being sad is the “right thing” to do right now. One day we will be out there again, breathing in the joys of the world. We’ll be walking down a crowded street, smiling and waving at people. We’ll wake up and feel tired but know that the day is filled with plans. We’ll fall in love with the sound of traffic, the conversation with people, the car radio as it plays songs instead of news. And through it all, we’ll look back at this time of the coronavirus pandemic and not recount the infinite days of misery, the boring afternoons of binge-watching TV, the sleepless nights of scrolling through social media, but the emotions we felt. We’ll tell our children or grandchildren that as the world came to a screeching halt, we didn’t let our minds decay with it. We either hid our emotions or we let them thrive, but in the midst of it all, a microscopic virus did not stop us from acknowledging that they were there.