To a New Dawn: Letters of Solidarity Anthology

STACEY SMITH, 17 To all of our loved ones, First of all, I want to say how much I have missed you all.

Being apart for so long, it proves how much you mean to me. The fact that I could only see you through a screen, it hurt. The only way we could talk was through the phone.

There was no meet up, no family days out planned. Within seconds it was all taken away from us. It feels as though we haven’t done anything in 2020. No memories were made which we would hold onto for the rest of our lives. Nothing special happened, no celebrations, nothing. There’s a pain in my heart to think of what we’ve all been through. But the truth is, we have done something this year. We survived.

We survived it all.

Lockdown hands-down has been the worst experience of my life. Being isolated away from everyone. Constantly looking at the same four walls of my bedroom day in and day out. Life felt as though it was slowly slipping through my hands. I couldn’t catch a piece of it. Lockdown was keeping me captured in its cage, isolated from the world.

I couldn’t do anything. The beast that is Covid-19 had taken over all our lives. We became its prisoners and there was nothing we could do to escape. The anxiety and the fear swirled around my body. It was always looming over me with no escape in sight. The days seemed to draw out 94