The First Questionable Beach Day
The day is May 21, 2020. Rylee Holwager has officially spent two months inside the walls of her house due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic that made her fearful of people. She hasn’t seen a single person that hasn’t been her family. That day, it is all going to change.
Before the day the world shut down on March 18, 2020 (Holwager cites this as her COVID-19 anniversary because it was the last day she worked), she was an extremely social person with an extroverted personality. She could walk into a grocery store comfortably and actually enjoyed grocery shopping. She would see her friends at least once a week. When the world shut down, so did she.
Being locked inside her house slowly started to become dreary. Most of her days were spent not even leaving her white twin bed, playing Animal Crossing New Horizons, in a men’s 2XL good dog sweatshirt. The more she became accustomed to this new lifestyle, the more the outside world seemed so far away.
The more and more time her and her friends spent apart, the more they started to miss each other, so they began hosting Netflix watch parties when they weren’t all busy with school. Summer was right around the corner and one of her best friends, Alyssa Hovey, brought up during the movie that she would like to go to Carpinteria State Beach and not go alone.
So many thoughts passed through Holwager’s head. Is it safe to go? How do you wear a mask to the beach? Can I properly social distance myself? Do I trust my friends? Is it worth the risk?
If you would have asked her a year ago, the answer would have been undoubtedly yes. There is a reason for the water drop tattoo on her right ankle. Now, her response was, “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”
All of those questions continued to spiral in her mind. She needed advice. She turned to her other friends and her mother asking them, “am I a terrible person if I do this?”
After getting the reassurance she needs and trusting her friends with their isolation methods, she finally decides that she is going to step out of the house for the first time in two months.
On the morning of May 21, 2020, a blue Toyota Tacoma, driven by Hovey, pulls up to her house. She was immediately hit with anxiety. She hadn’t seen her friends in, what she defines as, forever. The right, back door creaks as she opens it and immediately her ears are filled with the familiar voices of her best friends, Alyssa Hovey and Lejai Goodman, saying hello and how they missed her so much. As the car leaves Santa Clarita, so does all of her anxiety.
The pandemic brought so much fear into Holwager’s life, but one thing is for certain — her best friends will never fail to bring comfortability back into her life.
