Marquette University Intimations Project

Krystal Rodriguez

As I huff and puff against my thickly filtered mask while pacing quickly towards my home base, I also pass others with a polar opposite demeanor – unworried and unmasked. In a matter of a year, life became a battleground with an invisible enemy on the frontline. However, even the youngest and most sound in the fight to protect humanity, many were unphased or unwilling to strategize against an enemy so lethal and so unknown. Yet, there were others like me, those who were deathly afraid of death itself. 

At the start of the pandemic people made a choice: to protect ourselves thereby protecting others or live our lives as usual thereby disregarding the lives around us. I know that choosing to protect myself extensively was the right decision, yet for an entire year, I see many of my fellow peers who chose wrong, selfishly carrying on with the most trivial and unnecessary things of life. 

I began to ask myself, “I am doing the right thing, but at what cost?” The cost being a complete change in who I saw in the mirror. Suddenly, the social butterfly was squashed completely, considered to be unrecognizable and seemingly hopeless. What the most ironic part of it all is that death became the biggest fear of mine throughout the span of the past year, yet I had parts of me that were already dead. 

Four ten by twenty foot walls became my home base, where I felt the most safe and unafraid. In the midst of myself escaping from the pandemic itself, I began to realize what else I was running from. I have run away from normalcy and the possibilities of ever returning to

‘normal’. Whatever normal was before, it scares the hell out of me. The death of myself has been a sense of normalcy for me, but one thing that has not died is my desire to fight regardless of the obstacles ahead. 

For months, I have been labeled as the oddly safe and visibly sensitive person, but why has that been the case? Why must a year of my life be lost while others’ continue to progress? Why must I lose who I once was because I care about the people around me? Why am I following the unspoken rules? All of these questions swarm me everyday as I retreat towards my room, wondering when this war will cease.