I WAS IN seventh grade when I lost all my friends.
I still remember the joy as we watched the livestream of our school district signing into effect that we would close schools indefinitely. I was in Mrs. Kang’s classroom and she stopped chanting ‘warm air rises cool air falls’ with exaggerated hand motions like she always did and we all just sat and watched. We didn’t do any work for the rest of the school day and I found my best friend Atharva during passing period and we talked over masks about how fun it would be to stay at home all day and sleep all we wanted and not do any work for the rest of the year. There was electricity in the air. It was the best day of childhood.
I didn’t know it would be the last.
The lockdown interests me because of what it revealed, not what it caused. Strip away physical proximity, replace every act of togetherness with its nearest digital substitute, and something quietly breaks. Not just friendships. Something harder to name: the felt sense that society is pulling us toward each other. That the current of daily life, if you simply move through it, will carry you into contact with other people in ways that matter.
COVID ran that experiment to completion and made us watch. Five hundred days of virtual learning. Friendships mediated exclusively through Discord. What we saw — the isolation, the atrophy, the peculiar grief of losing friends you could still technically message anytime — wasn’t a new problem. It was a tide that had been rising for decades, finally visible because there was nothing left to hide it.
The lockdown was the clearest picture yet of where that tide was taking us. And it wasn’t unforeseeable.