What Will Change, What Will Not

We will work from home when we’re feeling even mildly under the weather. We will still spend half the day napping when we do.

We will store more canned foods in our pantries. We will still lie to ourselves about the ability to keep chips “long-term” (more than 45 minutes).

We will wash our hands more. Men will still not wash their hands enough. There will be times when they scratch their balls and do not immediately wash after. This will always be gross.

Coachella will be less popular. Because the attendees could spread another virus around, we will now have a moral justification for hating the people who go (instead of just an instinctual one).

We will think of traveling as a privilege, not simply as a means of getting to weddings we don’t want to attend.

We will still complain that mothers only had kids so they could cut the line for the ferry to The Island, where we all will be forced to live.

We will talk about how much we enjoyed reading in quarantine. We will still never read books. Our mother screamed at us to pack exactly one suitcase of essentials and escape before the US ran out of natural resources and descended into lawlessness. We will pack our vibrator(s), but not one single book.

We will cook for ourselves instead of taking every opportunity to go out to eat. The meals we make will still be just nuts, every time — they’re the easiest to forage. We obviously prioritized getting a following on TikTok over learning how to hunt.

We will think it’s very cool that Taylor Swift is our neighbor now. We will still be nosy because she’s famous — is the inside of her cave bejeweled?

We will take a moment to appreciate that there are no DMVs on The Island.

We will value seeing our family in person. We will still need the cave to ourselves, sometimes, though. I mean — what was the point of bringing our vibrators?

We will support universal healthcare, which is now just a sign warning people not to eat the poison berries.

We will, for the very first time, be relieved that our parents own a gun, especially since that sign didn’t do the trick, and the consumers of wild berries have turned into flesh-eating automatons. We will still resent that our parents are Republicans.

We will learn to live without our CBD oil. We will still have regular panic attacks when we imagine that someone might be coming to suck our blood — is that what flesh-eaters do? We didn’t watch post-apocalyptic content when we had the chance, because The Bachelor was on, duh.

We will understand that life will be forever changed, and we will fully adapt. We will still hate that the cute guy who lives by the river asked us what two trees our cave stood beneath but then never stopped by. He wasn’t even that cute. Maybe he ate a berry, though (we will still give men too many chances).

We will wonder if Timothée Chalamet is on The Island. He could suck our blood.

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