COVID-19 has completely changed my relationship with my friends. In order to stay safe and protect the people I love, the face to face communication I once shared with my friends is limited. 

 In order to maintain the relationships I Facetime my friends daily, and we constantly check in with each other. Two of my close friends and I have built a routine of Facetiming at 11:15 every day to do homework in order to keep each other on task. Occasionally we will hang out while maintaining social distance, but it is not the same as it was before. It sucks not to be able to hug my friends, but I do not want to put anyone’s health at risk.

Virtually, my friends and I have played cards online together and we watch a lot of tv shows and movies via Netflix party. Recently, since the weather has been nicer, we have put out a projector outside and have watched movies at night. We have also gone on bike rides outside to enjoy the weather since it is finally beginning to become consistently nice outside. A few of my friends and I have even played tennis together since we can remain socially distant by standing on opposite sides of the court. 

I have been a part of a few birthday drive by’s, but I can confidently say that those are not my favorite thing to do. Recently for one of my friends’ birthdays, a few of us decorated her front lawn and surprised her outside with gifts, posters, and cookies. We ended up sitting on her front lawn for about five hours, but it was really nice to celebrate with her, even if it was not in a traditional way. 

If someone were to have told me six months ago that I would be doing drive by’s for birthdays and having to sit six feet away from my friends and family, I probably would have thought they were crazy. However, that is how life is right now, and it is important to make smart and cautious decisions to keep everyone safe. 

Since school is still going on right now, a good period of my day is spent at my desk doing school work, but I’m curious to see what I will do with the extra free time during summer break. I imagine that I will spend more time being socially distant with my friends, but will the activities we do together change? It’s hard to imagine every day of summer sitting six feet apart from my friends in someone’s yard, instead of going to the beach and doing the typical summer festivities. I’m sure we will come up with some fun and safe activities to do, but right now it feels like we have been robbed of summer vacation.