Yesterday was a melancholy fellow. No one wanted to spend any time with him at the moment since he’d spent lockup dwelling on the past. Present was always vibrant and alive living for the moment and going with the flow so she wasn’t doing too badly. No one had seen Future before so what they looked like was a complete mystery to everyone.
The lockup had affected everyone
differently. The party animals suffered greatly, unable to go to their local
gathering spots and consume copious amounts of liquids in the hopes of gaining
the courage to either perform ritualistic displays of movement, explain to
their pack for the thirtieth time why calling their ex at 3am was the perfect
solution to their problems of being single or to find a new, more suitable mate
who might possibly want them. Either way packing all the animals into a room
with loud, pulsating music with barely any means of ventilation accompanied
with no rules meant that at some point someone’s either stepped on someone
else’s toes, thrown up or ended up in tears. The nights had generally been
viewed with success if all three things could be achieved before the sun rose
the following day. To go from complete
freedom to pacing the floors or climbing the walls of their various caves or
cages at night did not dwell well with them, especially those who had spent
pre-lockup time doing everything in their power to avoid spending time with
Yesterday. Once the lockup began that was impossible.
The
night owls and the goth bats (who were cousins to the punk lemurs, which as
everyone knows, tends to come in a plethora of various forms) weren’t so bad,
continuing their solo rituals of creativity at night then sleeping through the
day and not giving a hoot whose feathers they ruffled or the accompanying nest
hair that went with their attitude whenever they had to Liptime anyone. Their
tweets became poetry while they flew between various sound cloud playlists.
The stay at home hippos took a while to
adjust to the lockup, doing their best to stay calm when the rules kept being
adjusted and then simply surrendered to wallowing in the mire that was the
added stress of new workloads, understanding that they were strong enough to
handle it while the rest of the world seemed to be in a tornado of panic.
The gossiping manatees where the ones who
kept the social media apps afloat during lockup. On the rare occasions that
they were awake they had a lot of shows and celebrity news to catch up on. The
manatees were quite solitary creatures preferring the company of their other halves
and so they didn’t group chat very often with their friends, but when they did
they were bound to become aggressive, especially when discussing who they
thought would win the latest season of Love Island.
Couples who had just started living
together pre-lockup were really forced to recon with each other nine months in.
Lockup tested the bounds of their new puppy love and for some they discovered
that they’d found the perfectly loyal partner, while for others they couldn’t
wait to be unleashed for a daily walk, because braving the elements on a
winters morning that had brought down a meter of snow during the night didn’t
seem so bad compared to spending twenty-two hours with someone who had some
major kinks and cattitude that they needed to work on which they decided to
take out on their partners.
At the beginning of the lockup Mother
Nature went wild, reclaiming her empty beaches. The oceans were in mourning at
not being able to make footprints vanish anymore (one of its few frivolous, yet
joyful pastimes). The wind was happy, able to blow wherever it wanted to with
barely any obstacles. The pigeon population were slightly pissed off since they
now had no one to feed them and they couldn’t pester anyone for food.
After a very long year all of the animals
in the lockup wondered what freedom would be like. Many of them had not
bothered getting dressed anymore and so they had the added challenge of having
to stuff extra lockup blubber they’d gained into clothes that hadn’t seen the
light of day in months. Some had forgotten their rituals of putting on their
war paint before going out to conquer the world, whereas others had taken the
time to try styles they had never been brave enough to show the rest of the
world.
Parents had a hard time with their cubs and
kits, having to keep the pack mentally and physically stimulated while being
together was difficult, especially in single parent households. Explaining the
lockup to children and teenagers was easy; living through it was not,
especially when it came to playful toddling kits who’s schedule was disrupted
leading to bouts of excessive energy and tantrums at 3am and hormonal teenage raccoons
who hid their emotional issues behind black masks of silence. It was also tough on the grandparents, not
being able to hug the grandchildren and the possibility of losing their friends
to the pandemic was something they never expected to experience in their old
age and if this virus had tortoise anything it was that the older generation
were strong and resilient and they were often the first ones to remind everyone
to be kind, stay strong, keep laughing and don’t forget to eat your vegetables.
A virus that can be spread by anyone and can kill the weaker of the species was
no laughing matter and although there had been a few pandemics before there had
been none of this kind.
There were some cheerful side effects
though. Little otters who didn’t give a dam finally got to finish renovating or
building their own. Animals with pet humans got to bond, play, annoy, love and
sleep more with their human than they ever had before. Wizard frogs with sticky
green thumbs got to get down and dirty in their passionate fields (or small
back gardens) of horticulture. Hobby horses engaged in whatever it was they’d
wanted to learn how to do or trotted through their favourite activities that
had made them feel calm and stable in the past.
And the bookworms got to burrow through their books, finishing one book
only to add at least four more to read in the future.
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