The second prompt from the club meeting this week. The prompt was "He (/she/they) had been planning this day for years."

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He had been making plans for this day since he'd first entered college. He had imagined that graduation would be a momentous occasion, with all of his closest friends and family lining the seats in the audience. They would go out to a fancy restaurant afterwards, and no one would complain about the prices.

Everyone would be focused on Andrew, congratulating him on his engineering degree.

This is how it should have been. Today, things looked much different.

Andrew stared at the screen, watching the ceremony over again. There had not been a large crowd. There had been no friends or family in the audience. Of course not. This sort of thing was not allowed in 2020.

The students had been strictly separated, walking across the stage at a healthy distance from one another. Andrew had felt the frustration more than the joy; this should have been his day. Instead, his parents had not been allowed to fly, and would now only be watching his ceremony through a computer screen. There would be no extravagant restaurants, only a stop at a fast food drive-through on his way home.

Andrew knew it mattered little to his parents; graduation was graduation. They would be proud, no matter what. But he still wondered. If this year had gone differently, if the terror and destruction had not reigned supreme, what could this day have been?

He knew he would never get this time, this moment, back for a do-over.

He chastised himself for thinking it; when so many had gone through so much devastation and heartbreak, when everyone's world had been turned into a nightmare scene, who was he to complain? But as hard as he tried, he could not forget how starkly his dreams had contrasted with his reality.