As we attempt to move forward from COVID-19, the roughly 1.1 million lives and three years lost serve as potent reminders of the pandemic’s enduring psychological and physical scars on the world. Despite loosened mask and vaccine mandate requirements and a steady decrease in deaths, COVID-19 is far from defeated, as it remains the third leading cause of death in the United States after heart disease and cancer, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
While understandable, society’s desire to move on does not negate COVID-19’s toll on countless individuals globally. The resulting fallout has given new meaning to the firsthand experience detailed below that I had one monotonous day during the height of the pandemic, reflecting a lesson I’ve kept and expanded upon retrospectively.
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Boom!!!
My science experiment had gone horribly wrong. I was engulfed in the white cloud of an explosion.
It all started during the long, dreary months of COVID. I was sick of reading, sick of fighting with my parents, and sick of staring for hours at the bottom of my brother’s sagging bunk above my head wondering whether the pandemic was going to end life as we knew it. I started to ask myself questions: Was a life like this worth it? What was the point of it all? I was not sure how many more days of this I could stand. Wake up, eat, read, eat, do asynchronous work, log onto online classes, eat, watch TV, rinse, and repeat. And repeat. And repeat.
My parents kept trying to encourage me to be “productive” and reassure me that “everything would be okay.” I was angry at them, at the world, and resentful that my life as I knew it had ceased to exist. I was isolated. I felt alone despite being surrounded by family.
I felt numb. I took long morning walks in my neighborhood, passing signs that read “Thank you,” “#Nurses Rule,” and “We love our health care workers.” I felt sorry for myself.
I was bored. One day I decided to take matters into my own hands. One of the highlights of my week was opening a box of highly anticipated groceries. I noticed that it came packed with dry ice, something that I had seen in labs at school and science camp but never had at home. I started to wonder: What experiments could I perform? I started small. In the first week, I measured how long it would take 20 g of CO2 to sublimate. The second week, I tested what would happen if I put water on the ice, and whether water would serve as a catalyst for this sublimation.
By the third week, I was ready to test something bigger, observing the pressure released as the dry ice changed from solid to gas. I put the ice in a bottle carefully with OXO stainless steel tongs and tightened the cap. It was a regular Pepsi bottle, a family-size one, decorated with patriotic colors that had faded in the burning summer light.
I left the bottle in the yard, closed the glass door, and waited. Nothing happened.
Still, nothing happened.
Frustrated, I flung open the door and marched angrily toward the bottle. Just as I reached the bottle, it exploded with such force that the bottle blew apart and hundreds of shards of plastic went flying in all directions propelled by the explosive force of the CO2 under pressure.
I was dazed; I had hypothesized that there would be a small pop and that the cap would have blown off. Instead, the explosion catapulted me to a dream-like sequence where I was watching myself in slow motion. I began to move, but I was stuck. It felt like wading through sand. I had inadvertently built a bomb.
I was rudely awakened from my dream by the sharp pain in my arms and my ears ringing. I looked up and saw my parents running towards me, their faces crumpled with concern. They looked scared. It was then that I looked down and saw that I was covered in blood. I quickly reassured them that everything was going to be okay, even though, at that point, I was not sure I believed that.
A visit to the emergency room, a few stitches, some treatment for severe burns, and hearing tests, and I was okay, at least on the surface.
It wasn’t my close brush with death that bothered me. It was having to endure wave after wave of shame and embarrassment washing over me. The scars and burns on my body were like a permanent billboard advertising my stupidity. I heard our neighbors whispering as I walked past: “We thought he was a science kid,” “he took no precautions,” and “I thought he was smarter.” That old image of myself as a STEM kid was gone. I was physically unscathed but the incident undermined my identity. I tried to brush my embarrassed feelings away, but as Tim O’Brien writes in The Things They Carried, those feelings are powerful and long-lasting: “I've had to live with it, feeling the shame, trying to push it away, and so by this act of remembrance, by putting the facts down on paper, I’m hoping to relieve at least some of the pressure on my dreams.”
The truth was, like the young O’Brien, “I couldn't endure the mockery, or the disgrace, or the….ridicule.” I had not yet attained O’Brien’s life perspective which allowed him to put his emotions in context: “Embarrassment, that's all it was.”
One night I was back on my bunk bed with my brother snoring softly above me when my peaceful slumber was interrupted by a regular but unwelcome guest: the dream of the bottle exploding. I woke up in a sweat. Like O’Brien, I realized I needed “to put the facts down on paper,” and to “relieve” some of the pressure on my dreams. I jumped out of bed, grabbed my journal, and started writing….
“Boom!...”
