The sore throat began on a Thursday. I didn’t think much of it – I have asthma and really bad seasonal allergies that usually hit the first week of February. None of my friends were sick, and we’d been to all the same places. Genuinely – I hadn’t even talked to anyone they hadn’t also talked to.
Then came the cough. I got worried, but there was no fever, no loss of taste or smell. All I felt was that I was dealing with a full asthmatic flare-up. I started up with the inhaler twice a day and kept about my business. My friends felt totally fine.
And then my roommate – a person I’d had minimal contact with – started coughing.
The world sort of melted before my eyes. An at-home test came back positive. Then another at-home test. The school picked me up to insert a small, needle-like q-tip halfway to my brain. A disapproving look from a doctor and an hour and a half to pack my belongings later, I was in quarantine housing.
It didn’t matter that I’d been feeling what now was being identified as symptoms for a week, I had to quarantine for seven days from my positive test, and then seven more and seven more and seven more until I test negative, which could be the majority of my time in Italy. I had to leave my single bedroom for a double room with a girl who coughed through the night and blamed me for getting her sick. I went from sharing an enormous, colorful apartment with three bathrooms and two kitchens to a white box with five girls and zero privacy.
It was the worst. It was the inevitable.
Hindsight being twenty-twenty, I should have tested the second I got a sore throat. The night before, my friends and I had sung our hearts out at a karaoke event, so when I woke up feeling scratchy, it was so explainable that it never even occurred to me that it could be something else. And when the coughing started, I assumed I’d irritated my throat enough to flare up my asthma.
The girls I live with outside of quarantine don’t like me very much. They were quick to blame me, saying I’d carried it in with me and my carelessness had selfishly destroyed another girl’s freedom. The thought is devastating – that my own mistakes have impacted another person – but it is rather fallible. The truth is, two weeks ago we were on multiple planes, arriving from all over the world, to a place we’ve never been. There was an extreme risk in coming here, and anyone could pick a contagious virus up pretty much anywhere. So it’s kind of a stretch to completely absolve yourself of blame and hold a grudge on a person you share a living space with, especially with no proof.
At least, it seems like a bad idea to me.
I’ve cried a lot in the last twenty-four hours. Cried because I couldn’t call my parents to tell them what was going on, since it was the middle of the workday for them. Cried because I didn’t want to pack up my life for the foreseeable future. Cried because I didn’t want to share a room with a person who hates me. Cried because I felt personally responsible for my own misgivings, and I wanted someone else to blame too. Cried because I had to cancel trips that couldn’t be canceled and tell people I’d interacted with within the last few days that they’d been exposed.
Since then, I’ve grown to some sort of blind acceptance.
It’ll give me more time to write and more time to prepare for classes to start. Hopefully, I’ll be able to start in-person classes in just over a week. Hopefully, I’ll be able to move back into my single bedroom and take showers without someone banging on the door begging me to finish. And hopefully, I’ll be able to go for runs again or go to the grocery store and pick up the items I want for dinner.
So if you study abroad and the worst and the inevitable happens, as it happened for me, I’m here to tell you that it might be the worst moment of your life so far. And that, if that’s true, it’s really not that bad. It’s not prison – you have streaming services, wifi, games, and the shortest sentence known to mankind. If the worst and the inevitable happens, remind yourself of the impermanence of life, brush the dust off your shoulders, pray you don’t get too sick, and be your resilient self.
The worst and the inevitable too shall pass.
