How have students at Arapahoe Community College felt since the strong changes brought on by COVID-19? #COVIDDiariesOfACC is a mini-series composed of non-fiction diary entries from the community of ACC. Thank you to the contributing writers for these pieces to publish on the Arapahoe Pinnacle. We welcome all submissions from the ACC and Littleton Community, email us at [email protected]

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The first thing I want in the morning… is coffee. I wish I could read a book for a while and meditate, but mostly I just want my coffee and to wash my face. It is quiet in the house and I am the first one up every single time. The house is quiet for a change and nobody has any demands of me. I can sip coffee and smoke a cigarette watching the sun come up. It gives me time to think all the things that I am usually too busy to stop and think about. I wonder if the neighbor had her baby. I wonder if the trash truck will come today. I guess I should plan which homework I will do after work. I really wish I could just go sit and read a book. I want to read all the time and almost never actually get to have the time to read. Everyone wants something – work needs me to figure out the problem with the invoice, someone has to clean the stupid kitchen again. I guess I will take my coffee and go unload the dishwasher and start reloading it. Oh, the cat needs to be fed as she’s in here making figure eights between my legs and purring at me. I guess I can sit and read a few pages with my coffee before it is time to log into work again. But, then again, I guess I could read some of my textbooks instead. I want to be responsible and do the right thing like I know that I should, but I really just want to read my new book that came in a few days ago and sip my coffee. I have so many books waiting to be read, to be loved, to be consumed. I keep clicking “Add to Cart” because what else is there to do stuck at home all of the time. I do not have time to read the books though and so they stack up and I stare longingly at them. I took a long weekend vacation away with the plan to just read books and do you know, I still did not read a single thing. I am disappointed in myself. The coffee wakes me up and feels good as the warmth flows into me. I wish the coffee could motivate me to do more for myself instead of just fortifying myself to keep giving to everything else. I have this running list in my head of everything I wish I could accomplish and then I do nothing. This is probably depression and isolation. I miss my life. Concerts, parties, lunches with friends, trips to the library… Overnight it just vanished, and we were sent home to work and everything shut down. Now, the world is falling apart around us all these months later and I just want to sit and read books and drink my coffee and escape into another world that is tucked neatly in between pages.