What I Really Lost to a Year of Online Classes
Finishing my last university class in my childhood bedroom on a Thursday afternoon was not quite how I imagined wrapping up the final year of my undergraduate degree. I pictured champagne fizzing on the pavement of my best friend’s balcony in her apartment in Toronto, Canada and letting the entire neighborhood know that we did it, we made it with drunken screams. I pictured holding each other close knowing how tough our degree was to obtain. Wrapping up senior year also meant that all our coffee shop study dates and nights we danced until our foreheads were slick with salty sweat and our knees felt like jello would be no more.
Instead of all of that, my mom comes into my room and kisses my cheek, tells me she is proud of me and suggests that maybe we can have some people over to our backyard patio when it is safe again. My friend edits photos of us together holding our degrees like we imagined we would. We panic looking for jobs, my other friend hops on a plane to move back home hours away and work at a museum. I eat scrambled eggs and stare out the window. My neighbours roar with laughter outside and I can hear my brother playing music from his bedroom beside mine. It all feels wrong.
I’ve been mourning the loss of my final year of university ever since stay-at-home orders hit Toronto in November 2020. A few months before lockdown, I moved into a new house. My bedroom had robin egg blue walls and an old fireplace sandwiched between two sconces. I hung up art and bought an aloe plant. I lived a five-minute walk from a coffee shop I grew to love, where the barista began making my drink as soon as I walked through the door. My friends and I studied at separate tables on campus with our masks on—the only way we were allowed. Even though my classes were still online, it felt like I could put the spring semester of 2020 behind me and start over, like maybe this semester would be different.
The neighbourhood where my student house was located was filled with old homes and trees and looked especially lovely in the fall (@ Arianna Kyriacou)
After only living in my new house for two months, I moved back to my hometown an hour away from Toronto, back to my childhood bedroom with almond-colored walls and my ancient oatmeal carpet dotted with acrylic paint. My dad worked in the basement, my mom was freshly retired, and my brother attended school from his bedroom. I moved my desk to face the window and woke up five minutes before lectures, rolling out of bed in my pajamas and onto my desk chair in a sleepy haze every morning.
My degree became more challenging; journalism was meant to be authentic and in-person, and students rarely answered source callouts for articles anymore. Although the pandemic paved the way for a lot of intricate and important stories, I was frankly sick of writing about it. It seemed to exhaust my entire newsroom to focus so much energy into a negative space every single day, where during every Zoom meeting we would think of more ways the pandemic had altered our everyday lives. We tried to come up with creative angles to keep the stories interesting, light, and fun, to draw in sources, but it all was a mask for the thesis, the root of the story. That the pandemic has changed each of our lives in ways we will never be able to truly articulate. I fantasized about working in the newsroom in my first year, walking in with a steaming cup of coffee and a notebook filled with story ideas I thought of the night before. Instead, I posted in deserted Facebook groups asking students how much marijuana they smoke and if the amount increased during the pandemic. This was not how it was supposed to be.
The bed I did most of my school work on when I definitely should have been sitting at my desk (@ Arianna Kyriacou)
Although I still harbor negativity about online school, constantly reminiscing on the way I lost those mundane moments, like taking the subway to class and reading thick paperbacks in staircases on campus, I also can see the contrast, the line drawn between the before and the after. The moments that I took for granted were mine until they weren’t. Those times grabbing lunch with friends in between classes, going to “study” but talking the entire time while a blank document sits in front of you, standing on top of tables at parties because you’re young and you’re with your friends and they make you feel like you can do embarrassing things even if you’re scared. They slipped through my fingers like a runny yolk while I tried to grasp them, cup them, taste them, hold them close to my chest. Those moments we miss, the small ones, the overwhelming ones, the sad ones and the happy ones, are still ours. They will always be ours.
My best friends and I on a bench outside of a club in Toronto, Canada. (@ Arianna Kyriacou)
There comes a day when you realize time isn’t on your side. When you see the crow’s feet next to your mother’s eyes, her blue veins raised like braille on her arms. When you start a night out with glasses of pink wine and blink and it’s already over. When getting together with friends turns into pixels on a screen and the connection is hanging by a thread. When your favourite professor does their best to lecture to you while their kids run circles around their kitchen island in the background of their Zoom screen. When you walk onto campus for the first time, and before you know it, you’re in your childhood bedroom on a Thursday afternoon finishing your degree.
It takes a loss like this to appreciate the things we didn’t even know we would miss, the things we will never take for granted again, the things we won’t let slip through our fingers this time.
By Arianna Kyriacou
Journalism major at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, minoring in political science. Probably drinking a vanilla cold brew with my nose stuck in a book.