3/17/20: Hopefully, you're reading this at a time when the story is complete, where you now know that despite early shortcomings, the United States and the human race as a whole managed to band together and strategically fend off the pandemic before it became catastrophic, and now life has returned to normal. If only.

3/21/20: I don't even really know what to write about because there's nothing happening. I mean, objectively thousands are dying, the stock market is crashing, we're entering a recession, and the entire developed world has come to an indefinite standstill. But to me, the individual, it's just a whole lot of late nights and days of wasted time. That may sound shallow, but I feel emotionally exhausted from all the bad news at this point.

4/4/20: Now I know why books about terrible times get made - they actually do happen.

8/3/20: This is our grim, unforgiving reality and we're stuck here - feels easier to just acknowledge bad things as bad and not think about them further. Today I got a sudden impulse to look at my old Biology binder, and just... seeing old papers, old tests, old notes, old little messages me and Alex wrote to each other in class... the fact that I can never, ever go back to that just hit me like a sack of bricks. Everything in there feels like relics from a different time. It's not a sharp or loud hurt, but a rolling and quiet pain that what is gone is gone, and can't be taken back.

8/27/20: This could have easily been a completely ordinary year. But it just simply wasn't. I want off 2020's wild ride.

11/29/20: I made it home and got a negative COVID test. What more can a girl ask for? Interestingly enough, upon re-entering ordinary, purple bubble-less society, I'm more isolated than when I was literally in a place deliberately meant to be isolated. Please, vaccine, come soon.