A letter from May 13th, 2020

Dear Future Self, 5/12/2020 Happy National Nutty Fudge Day! This is you when you were 12 years old in 6th grade at Gahanna Middle School East, during the COVID-19 pandemic. You wrote this letter in the last full week of the shortened school year for the Living History project in Mrs. Forster’s E.L.A. class. I’m not really sure where you’ll be years from now. I’m probably going to send this a few different times so you can get it throughout your life and have a reminder of the tough time you went through during the COVID-19 pandemic. Maybe in about 20 years you’re in space or landing on Mars. Who knows, maybe Mom finally convinced you to get contacts. I wouldn’t bet on it, though. Maybe you’re married or you’re traveling the world or you’re a Seagull Suit manufacturer(remember that from the vacation over winter break 2019 to 2020 with the Hamiltons?!) or you decided to become a hippie. Please don’t become a hippie. That was just a joke. I just hope that wherever you are(hopefully in space), you’re happy and you still have a sense of humor. You can do anything(well, disclaimer, you probably can’t sprout wings and fly, but it’s just an expression). I believe in us. Today is Day 60 of the coronavirus break. That’s what I’m calling the days until life gets back to normal. Everything has been so weird through all of this, going back to Thursday, March 12, when schools were ordered to close. It was just supposed to be 3 weeks then. But going back April 6 turned into May 4, which turned into a complete full-year shutdown. This is going to be one of the things that people are talking about years from now. Kids are going to learn about this pandemic in history class. There’s going to be books written about COVID-19. And to think, wow, we’re living through a historical event, well, that’s really something. Everything it seems, even normal everyday experiences, have been changed by this. Our entire soccer season got cancelled. Schools across the country got shut down, right when I finally got good seats in all of my classes. You can’t buy toilet paper or cleaning products anymore. The cleaning product shortage makes sense because of wanting to **** germs, but toilet paper? I don’t know what about the pandemic makes people suddenly feel the need to hoard toilet paper. But a good change is that there hasn’t been as much traffic lately, which is amazing because sitting in rush hour traffic is super annoying. I’m not sure if you’re still into math and science, but I hope you are. I’ve been keeping track of the Ohio COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. I have detailed daily records going back to the end of March. The first Ohio case was reported on March 9. Of yesterday(the numbers aren’t updated until 2:00 p.m., and I’m writing this at 9:46 a.m.), there were 24,777 Ohio cases, 4,413 hospitalizations, and 1,357 deaths. The hospitalization rate was 17.8%, and the ***** rate was 5.5%. None of these numbers are good. Even after this is over, things aren’t going to be completely normal. Experts say that we’re going to have to wear masks for at least 12 to 18 months after quarantine ends. 12 to 18 months before we get back to some sort of strange new normal. How do you have school with masks and 6 feet of social distance? That’s like half of the normal capacity, probably even less. If one person gets sick, is the school shut down for 14 days? And how do you explain to a little kid or someone with disabilities that they have to wear an annoying, itchy face covering all day? Wearing a mask is annoying to me because it makes my glasses fog up when I breathe. Is that going to be what I have to do for the next year and a half? Honestly, I think that most people won’t be completely comfortable going out in public again until there’s a COVID-19 vaccine. But developing vaccines can take years. How many small businesses will shut down and never reopen during that time? How much money will airlines lose from the lack of travel? And how long will it be until I can see my friends in person again or visit my grandparents or go eat in a restaurant? The answer is that I don’t know. No one really does right now. Maybe things will be normal again by the time this reaches you. I sure hope so. So yeah, everything has REALLY changed in our life over the past 60 days. Who knows when things are going to get back to normal? Will it be 100 days? Years? More? The COVID-19 pandemic changed everything, from where we go to what we’re able to buy. Life in the next months and years is going to be really different. Only you, my future self, knows where this all takes me. Your 12-year-old self, Madelyn Ohl P.S. I also hope you’re better at spelling by now. You had to use autocorrect for a lot of this.