I have always believed if you want to change the path you are on, all it takes is a sharp enough turn. I think the fear that most people have of it all has left me. Life has forced my hand too many times from even the most loved path to blink at a sudden change. Sometimes the trail less travelled takes you somewhere completely new. You can become someone you never knew you always were. 

The thing you have to understand is that I am a part of the bastard generation. Born a millennial of the mid 80's. Child of the hard working, go play outside, money-driven Boomers. Don't get me wrong, I love my parents dearly. I've been scorned by the Gen Xer's for missing being a teen in the height of 90's grunge. Forever blamed and confused with the Gen Z. Over saturated in technology and expectations. Lazy, or too paralysed to move, anxious. Crippled by the expectation of their Gen X helicopter parents who remembered their teenage years too clearly.

Mine was the generation to be pushed, and hard. Outside playing til the street lights came on in the middle class suburb I grew up in. It was expected you went to university to be taken seriously. Joke was on us when the recession hit. Yes, I always dreamed of killing time as a waitress by day and bartender by night. I'll admit, there are worse ways to spend your 20's. My first cell was paid by my first part-time job at the mall when I was 16. There was no Facebook. It was the gen that saw the birth of LAN parties. 

Those bartending days. Also the days of SARS. I remember well because it was recently after my illness began. During one of my four eventual bouts of Ecoli. When a visiting friend had to go through extreme contagion protocol, she half jokingly asked if I had SARS. 

Yet that's not quite where we are now. Less deadly possibly. Much more contagious. Life has felt surreal so long that I am numb to it. On this day, half a million are confirmed infected. It has hit 190/195 countries. It is 10 times more fatal than the flu and possibly airborne. It is most certainly not being taken as seriously in many part of the world.

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Here in Southern Ontario, where I can personally vouch for amazing and free healthcare, the eerie quiet of the city tells you its serious. It has a weight to the unusually quiet night air. It is felt in the uncertainty of what the world will look life when you next wake up. Yet I feel that I have been living this way quite some time already. My fight or flight sensor is broken.

As someone immune compromised, it is scarier. Yet I am more desensitized to the necessity of inner panic that comes from simply touching a public doorknob. I was initially diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis. Years later changed to Crowns Colitis. Somehow I feel safer with the city on lockdown. And yet it also feels a little too comfortable. Carthartic. While the world was likely due for a time out, so was I. 

Sometimes it's when I'm sitting enjoying a sip of Gibsons 12 rare whiskey with ginger. While my bartending days allowed me to find my signature drink, I only recently was introduced to what would become my new personal favourite poison. You see, I can still taste it on his lips. Something about being cooped up with my furious (and rightly so) husband, my tornado of a five year old in a city on lockdown in a province in a state of emergency... It makes one reflect.

My mind strays to the time I got to explore the life I never lived, the man whose path collide with mine so many times. Yet always the wrong time. Like a comet getting too close to a planet. I could deny him no more easy than one can deny gravity.

I worry this virus will infect the whole world. That many will die and forever change the landscape of the world my son will grow up in. But in the back of my mind the words I whispered to myself continue to reverberate. "What did I do? What did I do?". Finger to my lips, flushed in the face. Driving home to my family. My lips still tingling with the taste of whiskey on his breath. In a life full if sharp turns, why do I keep veering down the same forbidden path?