Normalcy | Define Normalcy

Normalcy

Though I had success in my research both when I was mad and when I was not, eventually I felt that my work would be better respected if I thought and acted like a 'normal' person. Over the years, I've been on both ends of what society defined as normal: a broke college student, surviving on r amen noodles and occasional snack bars for dessert while being cramped with two others in a 10 by 18 dorm room; an award-winning scientist, twelve years down the road. My greatest achievement was purchasing a $70,000 Mercedes-Benz.

That was my normal, the unspoken creed among those within the circle society stated I should travel.

I'd been called mad, poor, rich, a genius, an oddity, and a loner, but through each of those descriptions I never realized, until now, I'd been a fool.

A fool, for what—trying to fit in?

My name is not important, but my new purpose is. It is a purpose much bigger than myself—to serve, rescue, protect, and heal.

The hours were long and grueling, dead-ends discouraging, breakthroughs in research and recovered patients goaded my team and I forward. Sometimes, I grew lost in my studies, slide after slide, reading article after article on the internet. Time slipped away, as if I became another virus upon the slides I observed, in their world, seeking revenge on the destruction they had caused.

A bearded man in a white lab coat knocked on my private room's door. My supervisor.

He opened it without my response. "It's already after two. You need to take a break."

He'd given me permission two hours ago. I nodded my head, and the door sealed. With a heavy breath, I stored my slides and pushed my overworked microscope farther back on my station's table.

Expendable gloves fell within a trashcan as the big-knuckled hands which wore them washed under cool water. For an hour, I could extract my coat, lower my mask, and partake in my daily ritual to recall the times of normalcy while I ate. I ambled across my university's glossy gray tiles with my lunch sack in hand. The twin glass doors ahead led to the only thing reflecting my society's original normal: sunlight. Its vitamin D seeped into my pores.

Yet, the green land the golden sun warmed around me was desolate, empty from any signs of life, including the faithful ravens who scavenged the students' lunch scraps during the afternoons. COVID-19 left nothing to be gathered.

Only the virus's researchers were permitted on the campus now.

I embedded my sore bones onto a bench, a bench I once grew bitter about when occupied by the university's youth. For years, I griped over the garden's ever-prevalent crowds, the loud music that blasted through students' technological devices—which they called "hip", "trendy", and "fire" during my time as a professor there.

Those moments of normalcy: the weekly agitations, the frustrations, the numerous occurrences I wished for silence, and the generational disconnect. How I missed their presence. Since society's distancing, my company were the garden's blooms, passing bees, and the university's clock tower.

How much louder the clock's chimes struck.

How much deeper the flowing wind howled.

How much I craved for a second of laughter, a second of a younger generation's voices, difficult to comprehend.

I completed my lunch, a cold ham sandwich lathered in mayonnaise, and washed it down with water. I crinkled my brown paper bag into a condensed ball and tossed it in an outdoor trashcan. My thoughts and the several stories within which catalyzed my latest purpose revived, beginning to swim again: using my brain as a pool, a mixture of hope, fear, and toxicity.

I returned to my work as the clock tower struck three. The chimes; they rang with the strength of a hundred gongs. My lab's silver doorknob unlocked with a click, motivating me with energy: to make progress, discover solutions, strengthen our society's hope.

I'd give anything to retrieve our world's normalcy again: my rest, my health, and even my sanity. I would gladly go back to being the strange old man uncomfortable in the crowds. Not for myself or my vanities, but for the youth rising after me.

I wouldn't permit the virus to continue to have its way over the globe. Brilliance, resilience, and dedication coated my team's backbone. I boasted in them, they boasted in me. We were of the same mind—willing to serve.

I cleansed my hands and dried them, layering a fresh pair of gloves over large anxious knuckles. With my coat and mask restored upon my body, I prepared my slides and microscope.

Our society had lost many in the new ways of living in the last several months, but human beings are strong. We have the ability to identify errors and adapt. We have the ability to improve; it is encoded within us: to identify errors, adapt, produce immunity to past trials.

Our society will adapt. It will one day become immune to the trial set upon us. Our society will be better, treasured, and healed.

And that is why I serve. I serve for society's normalcy, the old, the current, and the future.

I secured my place on my serving stool and hovered over my purpose, locking a gleaming slide on the microscope to be observed.

Our society will achieve normalcy again. It will be better, protected, and healed. Normalcy will be renewed. Normalcy will be adapted. Our normalcy will be strengthened.