My own prediction

2020—the year of my last trip to Cuba, the final taste of sun, salsa, and mojitos before the world locked itself away like a bad reality show contestant who realized they’d signed up for the wrong season. I was part of the last cohort allowed on the island, blissfully unaware that I’d be swapping white sandy beaches for white toilet paper shortages in a few short weeks.

Five years ago, I was still married. And if you had asked me back then, I would have told you that my marriage was my fortress, my shelter against the storm, my unshakable constant. Ah, what a delightful little illusion! If only I had consulted a fortune teller—though, let’s be real, even Nostradamus might have skipped predicting that disaster.

Covid hit, and instead of cozying up with my beloved under a warm blanket of mutual support, I found myself alone, clutching a prayer book and questioning all my life choices. It turned out that my so-called rock-solid marriage was more like a sandcastle at high tide—pretty while it lasted, but washed away the moment things got rough.

Five years ago, I was afraid—not just of pandemics or economic collapses, but of something much scarier—change. I had wrapped myself in a cozy cocoon of familiarity, mistaking it for security, when, really, it was just a well-decorated waiting room for disappointment.

Covid didn’t just show me that my marriage had an expiration date; it grabbed a megaphone and screamed it in my face. The person I thought would be my shoulder to cry on wasn’t even in the same emotional zip code. And so, as the world braced for the apocalypse, I braced for my meltdown.

But here’s the thing about surviving both a global crisis and a divorce—you come out the other side with an absurd amount of resilience, a newly acquired talent for assembling IKEA furniture alone, and an uncanny ability to sniff out red flags like a trained bomb dog.

So, if I were my own fortune teller five years ago, I would have leaned over my crystal ball, taken a deep breath, and whispered, “Brace yourself, darling. You’re about to get your heart broken, your world shaken, and your life rewritten. But guess what? You’re going to be just fine. Better, even. Now, go pack for Costa Rica—because after this, you’ll need a comeback tour.”