Essay: Our roaring twenties- A letter from the future by Adwitya Taneja

This essay by Adwitya Taneja details the perspective of the life of a twenty-year-old in the middle of a pandemic through a future narrative voice depicting how their life was impacted by the pandemic in a way that altered their perspective of life and their expectations from the future. 

It was a time when words like quarantine, vaccine, variants became common parle, the invisible mask each one of us don was now visibly glaring in thick synthetic blue, while we struggled to spell out the next new Greek alphabet, alarming us of the chaos yet to unfold in our lives. 

It was the dawn of our roaring twenties. Standing at the edge of our first season of life, what often came our way was ‘advice’- rinsed with flavors of nostalgia, regret, and longing. Funnily enough, all these words of wisdom and lessons of life were laced with a heavy unsaid expectation urging us to ‘take that risk’ and utilize each day of this age of youth. No matter how overwhelming this did sound at the time, our early twenties are much like a throw of dice, we were just too young to lose anything. 

Amidst a global pandemic that pulled the rug from under our feet at the prime of our lives; We struggled to materialize the ‘live, laugh and love’ bumper sticker. Yet little did we know, that the unexpected visitor that greeted us in our youth, would end up preparing us for one of the most extraordinary lessons of life. You see, when an alien virus suddenly takes over the world transforming into a modern plague that wipes out more than half a million people, you are eventually pushed to ‘Do or Die’.