I thought I was finally able to have this girl over since it winter break. I was just hoping we could watch a movie or something; she’s the only one I’ve genuinely liked despite all my past relationships, and it seems like she feels the same. She was genuinely excited to spend more time with me after I drove her around to a plaza and went to a bunch of stores. I was even about to clean the entire house before she came over, when I usually let my room get as bad as a crack den before I get out the garbage bags.

I brought up the idea to my mother after I got a $3500 scholarship to university so she’d be in a good mood and more likely to say yes, but she flat out denied it. Not because she hates the girl or thinks she’s “lower-class” (what she usually thinks of everyone I know), but because she’s still fucking paranoid about the virus. She told me to wait until things “calm down”.

I’m a high school senior. I’ve spent half of my high school years locked in my fucking room while she goes to the mall every week and probably contracted the virus multiple times. After winter break I have exams. Weekends and March break mean nothing but more time to be assigned homework. I’m spending the summer in California (a trip I’ve planned for over a year) and I get shipped off in the fall to another four years of school.

I just want to have some semblance of an adolescence and maybe a girlfriend I actually care about while my mother fully buys into the fearmongering that propagates every time a new variant is discovered. There are most certainly details I’ve missed but this is all I can write without wanting to blow my fucking head off with a 12 gauge.