Ice Wing

It was during May of 2022 that several events took place that would herald the beginning of a new chapter in my life. It was a tumultuous period for me, and my family as well. It all started with the Spring 2022 term ending, and to put it simply, I had flunked it completely. I was still suffering from the decisive blow that lockdown had dealt to my interest in education, and honestly, in hindsight, I’m very glad that the pandemic started when I was in my last year at school, so my grades didn’t have time to drop much. It also didn’t help that my classes were still virtual and therefore there was zero pressure for me to attend them, nor could they keep my attention. Virtual classes were simply incompatible with my learning style, and it was a wonder I had passed the Fall 2021 semester with decent grades.

While I had been concealing my lackluster performance from my parents for the duration of the semester, there was no hiding the truth once my grades were revealed. Both of my parents were very disappointed, demanding explanations that I was unable to provide. I didn’t want to face the seemingly insurmountable foe that was my own apathy and indifference. I didn’t know how to fix it, so it was easier to deny it and pretend that it was something out of my control, that things would just magically get better once classes became face-to-face. If I could even survive until then.

Unfortunately for me (or fortunately, in hindsight), my mother refused my denials. She wanted concrete answers. She knew I was smart. I always had been, had always had a passion for learning advanced topics above what was expected of me, was always top of my class. And I knew that I was smart, too. I could dominate all my classes, I had all of the tools and knowledge necessary to do so. But something fundamental just wasn’t connecting and I remained average. I explained as much to my mother that Sunday night, May 8th, amidst increasingly desperate attempts to convince her that I did care, that I was also just as saddened and disappointed by my results, that it wasn’t my fault I wasn’t that outwardly expressive so she couldn’t see just how much it was affecting me. Understandably, she didn’t believe me.

It was a rough night, soured by the fact that just earlier that day I had been congratulating my mom on being crowned Mother of the Year at church that morning. She felt that my failure was a reflection on her, and despite my own belief that my failures had nothing to do with my parents, I couldn’t help but feel terrible for ruining what should’ve been her special day. She was a good mother. My failure was not her fault. But if it wasn’t mine, as I so fervently insisted, and it wasn’t my family’s then whose was it? At the time, I had settled on indirectly blaming my teachers, and the lockdown that forced virtual learning on me in the first place. It was their fault for not properly adapting to virtual education, never mind the fact that everyone else was doing fine and it was only me who had a major problem.

However, despite my minute victory, I was destined to lose the war against the hard truths of reality, and this was only the beginning of everything going downhill. I vaguely remember, between the on and off arguments with my mother and me drowning myself in my stories to further indulge in my crippling addiction to escapism, my father mentioned that his brother, one of my uncles who I was very close with, was in the hospital. It was nothing to worry about, he had bad kidneys and had to go in every so often for dialysis. 

I remember my father being upset, but he was almost always upset for some reason or other. This time, the idiots he had the displeasure of dealing with were the hospital my uncle was at. Something about his treatment being delayed, resulting in a longer stay than either my dad or uncle wanted. At the time, I shrugged it off. It was just my dad being dramatic again. Sure, a delay was annoying and inconvenient, but it wasn’t the end of the world.

Over the course of a week, it evolved from a delay into something else. Something worse. My uncle had begun coughing uncontrollably and displaying difficulties with breathing. Symptoms that had NOTHING to do with kidney problems and were disturbingly like the symptoms of a global pandemic that was still ravaging the country to the point of mandatory lockdown. But surely, he couldn’t have the virus. He was perfectly healthy, aside from his already bad kidneys, when he went to the hospital.

A few days and twenty frantic eavesdropped phone calls later, and apparently, the doctors weren’t acknowledging that my uncle had covid. He clearly had to have caught it from someone else while in the hospital, and most likely, they didn’t want to acknowledge that they were at fault, so they ignored it. It also didn’t help that a shooting had occurred, so the top priority was the shooting victims and not my uncle.

Less than two weeks after he was admitted to the hospital, my uncle died. It was shocking how quickly he deteriorated and shocking how quickly I slingshot from not caring to caring deeply. As I usually do with family deaths, I went emotionless. I had yet to fully acknowledge his death, and while all my siblings were crying and mourning, I could barely summon a single tear. I knew that this was my own way of grieving, I knew that my family knew, that I would remain stoic right up until the coffin was buried and it finally hit in that I would never see that person again, and then a month’s worth of tears would explode out of me and render me non-functional for the rest of the day. But for some reason, this time I couldn’t stop the guilt that hit me. 

“Didn’t you care about him?” My own brain screamed at me, prodding for a reaction, but try as I might to simulate the sorrow my siblings were feeling, my eyes remained dry, and I could not escape the neutral haze that had descended on me. “Of course not. You don’t care about anything.”

I wanted to scream back at myself that I did! I did care! I cared very much about him! I cared about family, I cared about how my parents perceived me, I cared about my grades… But my protests fell on deaf ears.

Even when the tears finally did fall, watching the limo pull away with my uncle’s body in the trunk, and vaguely feeling all my cousins hugging me, I felt no vindication. My own raw emotions felt like an act, and I felt terrible for deceiving my family, for making them think they had to hug and comfort me.

I no longer cared about my own feelings. I just wanted to stop being a burden to my family. But I didn’t know how to start being useful, and it all stemmed from my own lack of care. It may not have been my fault that virtual learning had demoralized me, had started a slow descent into detachment, but I had made little to no effort to reignite that missing passion, expecting others to do it for me instead.

It took another year for me to finally regain that passion for learning that I last almost four years ago, though the entire time I tried to chase away the fog of apathy as much as possible so that when a spark did arise it wouldn’t immediately be snuffed out by cold indifference, and even now, nurturing that flame back into what it once was seems like an impossible task, but one that I will face head-on until the day I die. For I refuse, absolutely refuse, to turn into that shell of a person I was back then. I feel I was extremely lucky to acknowledge it when I did.