Oh What a Year!

It’s June and I haven’t written in months. Six months to be precise. I haven’t written since the beginning of the year. Long before the corona virus hit and we knew it was a pandemic here to stay, a kind of lethargy had stolen over me. A kind that makes one desert the mundane activities that bring them joy. It was perhaps an omen for how the year will take shape, but I brushed it off as a writer’s block or a lack of inspiration which beclouds a creative every now and then and was nothing to fret about. But it turned out to be in fact a foreboding, an inauspicious one.

Like it did for most people, the new year began on a hopeful note. I was thrilled to discover what lies ahead in the uncharted months of 2020. I made plans and resolutions, changed my wardrobe, re-registered for gym, I was ready for the new year or so I thought. For me the arctic descent began with the announcement of the “Trump Nigerian ban”, an inconceivable threat to my perfectly laid out plans, and the first sign that the year was going to be a bitter melon.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Covid-19 pandemic pounced on the world and disproportionately on New York, my city of residence, leaving behind a death toll in the United States higher than that of the Vietnam War, Gulf War, Afghanistan War, and Iraq War combined. Right before my very eyes, the ever bustling New York city became a ghost town devoid of it’s usual boisterousness. And just when we thought we were finally overcoming this pandemic, the racism pandemic strikes! A white cop murdered an unarmed black man, viciously cutting off his breath in a knee strangulation, bringing about an unrest in the entire already unsettled world.

In a matter of days, thousands flood to the previously empty streets in protest. Some peaceful, some violent, but all disavowing the injustice that has permeated our society for so long. The protest a sort of silver lining in the midst of a dark cloud, but one that calls for caution, as the virus still looms over us.

In other news, there’s new Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The very last thing the world needs right now. Oh what a year!