Superstar Crush

The Pandemic

After the pandemic ended, it felt like everyone had been reborn. It felt like I did not know anything about the modern world. The older generations said that this might be the worst thing to happen to their children. But in actuality, this is the best thing that has happened to them. Most of Generation Z prefer to be alone in a place with a strong internet connection. But here is what they do not understand, not everyone had good internet, not everyone had the money to have everything. As a middle-class family, we always get what we need and rarely get what we want. There is a big difference between WANTS and NEEDS. There might be times when the things that I wanted were also the things that I needed. But there was only a tiny chance of that happening. That was why, when we do get the things that we want, we do everything to take care of them.

I was only a senior high school student when the pandemic era started, and of course, we only studied through the internet. In the third semester, the pandemic outbreak began. None of us knew that it would turn into a global disaster.

Every country got affected by the virus. Some were able to control the spread of the virus, but some countries had failed and started falling.

After a few months, some countries adapted and had better results at infection rates than other countries.

Unfortunately, the people in our country are stupid. After seeing some progress, people will treat the virus as something that never happened, and the results came back up and got worse. Every month, the rates got worse and worse, and people panicked because of this.

They blamed the government for the rose in infection rates and wanted to throw them out of their places.

We, students, did not care about this. We just did everything that we were told to us by our parents, teachers, and other people who had authority at the time. We never had our voice since we liked what was happening.

We got to have more time with ourselves. We had a long vacation from our schoolwork, and we got to spend as much time as we wanted to with our gadgets. We had complete freedom on the internet and were locked away from others.

But everything changed when the online classes started.

I changed schools when I entered Senior High School. I never experienced retreat, JS prom, and other stuff that an average Filipino teenager would have already experienced by that time. And that made most of the incoming senior high school students very sad.

They said high school was supposed to be the best years of a person, but we never get to experience that.

I never wanted to go to a university. I wanted to stay at my previous school. But due to my family’s financial problems, I needed to go to a cheaper university. Just like how a middle-class family would say, “you can get what you need, rarely what you want.”

I had this classmate from my previous school, and she was the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. Her name is Jessie.

Jessie and I were close friends. She always had my back as I got hers, too. We always had fun times, and I always thought that I would not want to lose her.

As we both fooled around with each other's feelings for four years, I fell in love with her. I never tried to court her because I always knew she would just reject me since she had only thought of me as a friend.

And then things became worse. Jessie fell in love with one of my great friends. And I couldn't do anything, so I just gave up. I knew that Jessie liked him so much, so I tried to suck it up and be okay with it.

When they broke up during the pandemic, I was the one who helped him to get back with her. It was to prove to myself that I was alright with them being together.

During my enrollment, I found out that Jessie was also enrolling in the same university I was going to, which made me feel awkward. I didn’t know what to feel, or do, or say. And being stuck at our house almost took me out of my mind. But since she was the only one I knew in the university, I tried to control myself.

We helped each other in getting the papers we both needed to enter the university. But I was not able to control my feelings for Jessie. After a few days, I confessed my true feelings for her. I did not know what to expect from my confession.

Unfortunately, she was still in love with my best friend. I got rejected, but it was still not the worst thing.

Things got way too awkward for us. She stopped talking to me for a few months and only contacted me when she needed help with her application at the university. During those times, I felt lonely. Like I lost a part of my life, and it made me miserable. I tried to battle that loneliness with computer games like DOTA 2 and other easy hobbies, but I was too depressing, and it was not enough.