The Pandemic

During the month of March, I had become really sick, I had bronchitis which I get almost every year due to weather changes. My work team was already beginning to start working from home and I was the only one working at the station and sick in the meantime. After days of holding off on the severe coughing I was experiencing, I went to my doctor’s office and followed my doctor’s recommendation to stay home for at least 14 days in quarantine. After the quarantine, I was still very sick and hadn’t done much recovery. I ended up staying home for over a month with severe bronchitis. This is where the cases started to go really high in the coming weeks. When I was ready to go back to work and fully recovered, I got a call with the news that my position had been removed. I was left without a job.

I am so blessed because this is where the saying, “when one door closes another one opens”, comes in. I literally was left without a job for less than 24 hours. I was called by a different company and hired over the phone, without ever meeting my boss in person.

I had some time to get myself prepared and organized for the new company I’d be forever grateful to, and had another month off before I started to work officially. Once I started work, my fiancé was also still working and the cases kept going up and the world went into quarantine, and we were the exception. We were rarely seeing each other now since I was working elsewhere and we had different hours, but we always made it work. I would see him for a while on the weekends and here and there we’d meet at this place where there are cows just hanging around. It was honestly the highlight of my day. Watching the sunset, feeding cows (grass) and laughing, talking and taking pictures.

Then, we ended up living together temporarily because my house was under construction. We got a taste of what it would be like living together. We honestly spent every single day after work, hanging out, in the mornings, before I went in, we’d make breakfast and on the weekends we went out into nature. We would take walks by the bay and watch the sky lighting fade together, as we took walks by the park. We’d also spend a lot of time helping at the house with the construction and removing loads of trash from piles that were set out in the back yard. We also made many, many trips to Home Depot.

All the while, no matter what we did, wherever we could go, we made the best of it. It was weird transitioning from one place to another; I was going through major changes in my life. I had never felt uncertain about my next step in my career, nor had I moved so many times to different places back and forth. My fiancé told me that everything would be okay and it was. When the house was finished and no longer under construction, we started to miss how we got to spend every day together. We started to see each other less again and made the decision to move out together.

We started to decorate our new apartment, our first home together. We loved the place, but loved being with each other more. We would take random trips to the farmer’s market, Key West, watch more sun rises and the sun set by the beach, worked out together and made homemade meals at all hours of the day, whenever time was on our side.

During those months, I was working hybrid, so I spent a lot of time at home cooking new recipes; I loved it. My fiancé was the one who’d try them out and tell me how delicious the meal was or if I put too much pepper in the pot… It was the late night talking in bed and waking up to each other the next morning. It was the “would you like some breakfast?” and smelling the coffee brew in the kitchen. You’d think we’d be tired of each other by now, but we weren’t. It was so grand, we said, hey let’s get married sooner. There’s not going to be a wedding any time since everything is closed, but we could do this for us.

In ten days we were engaged, in nine months we were married. But we were not ready for the wildest ride of our lives! The next few months, our honeymoon phase would lead us to the biggest responsibility we’d ever have and will have for the rest of our lives. She is also the sweetest blessing we’ve been gifted with.