reading room
Half the World Away, Yet Here
I was eleven when the calendar split into before and after.
Year 6 ended mid-sentence— no SATs, no leavers' day— just empty desks, forgotten jumpers, and the smell of pencil shavings trapped in the dark.
High school began with masks and one-way arrows, voices muffled, friendships carried through glass and pixels. We queued in taped-off lines, sanitiser stinging our hands, eyes doing the smiling for us.
I knew it was awful— every news broadcast a roll call of the gone. I scrolled past names I didn't know, but someone's favourite person was gone. And sometimes, it was a name the whole world knew— Captain Sir Tom Moore, Bilbo Baggins, Chadwick Boseman, the voices and faces we thought would be there longer. For a moment, the grief was the same in every country.
I learned words I shouldn't have needed so young: lockdown, furlough, ventilator. Whole cities stood still while ambulances screamed through their empty veins.
And yet— in my own small world there was warmth I'd never felt before. Mum home in the evenings, guiding us through maths and English, teaching me the order of sharps and flats in a key signature. Dad cooking lunch, setting up little science experiments— vinegar fizzing in jam jars, paper bridges buckling under coins. Our cousins stayed for months, the house becoming one long classroom and one long sleepover— learning, laughing, growing closer than we'd ever been before.
The streets were quieter, the air lighter— like the planet itself had taken a breath. We'd clapped for strangers we'd never meet, shared bread still hot from the oven, spoke the same anxious numbers.
The world was small enough to fit inside one news story, large enough for the same moon to watch over us all.
The worst thing and the gentlest thing lived side by side: grief on the news, warmth in my kitchen. The whole world half the world away, yet somehow right here with me.
Events like this rarely come along— when the planet holds its breath and every life bends around the same story. Other generations had their own markers in time— the moon landing, the day the towers fell, the first voice carried on radio waves, the long nights of the Cold War. Now we have ours. Not in black-and-white photographs or flickering newsreels, but in our own lived hours— the quiet streets, the moonlit windows, the feeling of the whole world half the world away, yet here under that same patient moon.
And now we speak in new eras: pre-Covid, post-Covid— as if a virus rewrote the seasons, as if time itself paused and restarted.
Sometimes I look at the night sky and wonder if that same moon remembers us— huddled indoors, lit by blue screens, trying to feel less alone under its patient light.
— Lilith