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Memory

CW: This is a post about the pandemic, if you want to read less about the pandemic, you should skip this one. <3

CW: Also it mentions 9/11 more than once. Please be warned or skip this one.

If I were trying to tell someone a few decades on a whole story about the strange dimensions of life on earth just now, I wouldn’t know where to start. I wonder what I risk forgetting.

p1k3: notes from a time

I was thinking about this, too. In ten years' time we will know all the facts about the pandemic and I think a lot will be written. I _hope_ that this is a generation defining event (which is to say: I hope that this is the worst thing that happens for a long time) and will be studied in the same way as pre- and post- 9/11 world events are.

I'm already forgetting how everything felt in March.

Ottawa is back in a lock down right now but that doesn't seem like as big a deal -- the first lock down was surreal. We didn't know what we didn't know. People were being fined for having picnics in the park, but wearing a mask wasn't normalised yet. I felt like I might get stopped by security _for_ wearing a mask when going to the grocery store, where now you would get stopped for _not_ wearing one.

I'm already losing the details around how it felt to be in the world right then. Simultaneous terror and hope and despondence.

Terror; that this could be so bad it wipes us out, the start of a culling of humanity.

Hope; that all the worlds governments seemed to actually be agreeing and (more or less) doing the right thing for people, despite enormous economic impact. That we would put people's health above everything. Ban evictions. House the homeless.

Despondence; what was life going to be _for_ if we were locked in our homes long term? For months. For the whole year. For several years, who knows? What does it even mean to live in a city if all you're seeing is the same few hundred square feet every day?

Lots of bad stuff has happened since March and some good stuff has happened too, but that feeling, right there in the middle of March -- that feeling was almost unique for me. The real feeling that this was going to be something where there is a clear "before" and "after" -- a black ring in the tree-trunk of history.

I watched the news of the second tower being hit on a TV someone set up on a counter at work in 2001. I was 18. I don't know if I was just too young to feel like this right then. I certainly felt scared. At some point I even though the US might deploy nuclear weapons. Life was on pause, even as far away as Ireland, where I lived at the time. It took a long time for me to understand how profound the 9/11 attacks were on the whole world, not just the US. Maybe it was because it happened far away, and COVID-19 is happening everywhere?

I don't have a neat way to tie this entry up and finish it. Sorry. Part of me doesn't want to lose the feeling from March. The feeling that this was all unnatural, unusual, unique. We're in lock down again, and it probably won't be the last time for this pandemic, and this might be a recurring thing in the rest of my life. It's sad, but possible, that this will feel commonplace. I want to hold on to how the first one felt.