How I Met Your Father Season 37 Episode n ('Coz I've already lost count how many episodes I've tried to meet him)

Kids,

In the year 2020, all of us wished that we could either go back to year 2019 or just fast forward to year 2021.

Your Auntie Lizlie and Auntie Mona were stuck in Singapore (really, not a bad place to be stuck at). Your Uncle Kid, Auntie Steph and cousin Cayenne were stuck in Batangas City; cousin Baby No. 2 wasn't even born yet. Your grandparents? It wasn't easy but we managed to convince (read: force) them to stay put in their house. 

As for your father, I don't really know where he was that time. Probably, stuck in some place too. He's been stuck somewhere for an impossibly long time now.

Why were we stuck?

Well... The world stopped. All because of a virus called COVID-19. Now, I won't tell you anymore when, how and where that virus started because some of the details are quite hazy and I don't want to be accused of being racist, if I happen to use the wrong words. Being PC was quite a thing back then.

Except for maybe the government of Singapore, no one anticipated it to blow up like this. Auntie Lizlie and I even went to Japan for the Lunar New Year (A great trip, by the way. I thoroughly appreciated Japan this time around. Nagoya has become my new favorite city.).

I was all set to go back to class after the holidays. But then the Vietnam government decided to close down all schools for the first two weeks of February as a preventive measure against the virus. To be honest, at that time, I had thought the government was overreacting. Why, the rest of the world was just going about their business as usual. 

I can't remember now when exactly things turned for the worse. Suddenly, the number of positive cases in South Korea skyrocketed, coming in second to China's numbers. Then, numbers rose all around Asia including Vietnam. The contagion moved further to Europe, hitting Italy the hardest and then the North American continent. 

Two weeks of school closure in Vietnam became one month and then two. No one knew when the government would (and could they?) decide to re-open the schools and universities. I was paid by the hour so my finances definitely took a hit because there were less students who enrolled for online classes.    

Nations started closing their borders and stopped issuing visas to foreigners. Cities were locked down. Measures to limit people's movement were put in place. Finally, the world was taking COVID-19 seriously. 

It wasn't just an ordinary flu. It never was in the first place, although the symptoms were pretty similar to the common flu. What made it difficult to manage was because some virus carriers didn't show any symptoms at all. Incubation period of the virus could take longer than 14 days. There were some infected people who died within days of diagnosis. There were some who died even before their test results came out.

People became restless. Paranoid. Stressed. And then some country's government officials had the audacity to do irresponsible things like demanding they get tested although they were asymptomatic and/or going around town when they were supposed to be on quarantine for being a suspected case.

Me? I was taking the necessary precautions. But I didn't think I'd die from this virus even if I contracted it. I don't say so because I'm a positive thinker; far from being one, as you know. And no, it's not because I believed that buying that funeral plan for myself some months before the COVID-19 outbreak provided some sort of talisman that stopped death at its tracks. 

A part of me just sort-of knows that I'm gonna have an unnecessarily very long life ahead. Maybe it's because I'm a bad sort of grass and we all know what they say about bad grass - it's difficult to get rid of. Or maybe it's because I know that I won't always get exactly what I want.

Mind you, I don't want to die. At least, not yet. However, I also don't want to live too long. Unless living too long would mean I get to see you, my own kids, become adults and share with you my stories of the year 2020 like I imagine doing right now.

But see, kids, I haven't even met your father.