Dear Online School,

I hate you. You really, really suck.

School also sucks, but it sucks less when I get to see my friends. You take that away from me and all of my friends, replacing roaring pep rallies and finally understanding SohCahToa with turned-off-camera Zoom calls and empty heads. 

What really sucks is you were only a real necessity a year and a half ago. You took us by surprise under the benevolent guise of longer spring break and then spit in our faces. I knew you were necessary, but the longer you were in my life the worse it all became. Hours in my room, at my desk, staring off into space while my zoom calls rambled on. 

You made me miss a band concert, a musical, and a whole track season. I missed an entire end of a school year. You made me miss friends, learning, and growth. I can hardly work at my desk now because of the terrible feeling I had when you were first introduced to us. I also struggle to eat bagels with bacon on them because of you, but that’s a much lesser offense.

Now we’re at a place where people are talking about you again, and I had thought you were out of my life. If people just put on their masks and got vaccinated, everything would be fine and I wouldn’t need to hear about you. So many people have done everything to prevent you from coming back in our lives, and yet the threat of you is still on our minds. Like hamsters trapped on a little hamster wheel, we keep coming back to the starting point, over and over, until we figure out how to get off the wheel.

But I’m not as mad at the anti-vaxxers as I am at you. The desolate isolation that never seems to end but also goes by so fast it feels like you’re just wasting the life God gave you. “You” referring to me and others who feel the same, not you. You’re the one making me waste my life, my one-in-a-billion-trillion life that should be filled with everything it can be filled with. 

I never will fully understand the pressure people must feel when choosing between you and something else. You might be a necessity sometimes, but the fury and unbridled rage overlaying the fear and desperation I feel whenever anyone mentions you makes me wish you never existed. 

Unfortunately, however, for every high school and college student, you do exist. Your menacing shadow may very well loom over us all for a long time, too. Until you do, I’m stuck with a mask, anxiety, and red hot anger. 

Go away,

Jackson