I’ve begun to notice something odd about the way I’ve been forming and retaining memories since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. We’ve had this overshadowing almost everything else for a year and a half, and yet I still feel like things from late 2019 or early 2020 just happened recently, as if time stopped passing or moving forward when the pandemic began.

I’m thinking of a dinner we had with some grad school friends in College Park, Maryland, in September 2019, after a nature hike further north in rural Montgomery County. Our guide brought some black walnuts he’d dried, along with a metal press, and let us crack them open and try them before we started walking. Or Christmas of 2019—I remember the variety of bread we brought up when we visited my parents in New Jersey. It was a loaf of apple bread from our favorite bakery in Virginia, so we could have our favorite toast during the holiday week. Or our last pre-COVID dinner party, at a rowhouse in D.C. with another set of grad school friends. I remember the food and the beer and the conversations in detail: it’s hard to get likes on Twitter; Abita fruit beers look better than they taste. One of our friends was sick and sleeping on the couch, and we nervously laughed at the idea that she might have COVID. (Luckily for her, she didn’t.)

But everything after that almost…feels like it didn’t happen. That College Park dinner is over two years in the past, but it feels so recent. The details haven’t faded away like they normally would after two years. Part of my mind is still calculating time as if it’s been February 2020 ever since February 2020. It’s almost as if I subconsciously expect to get that time back.

There’s something hazy or even dream-like—maybe nightmarish is more like it—about this whole pandemic period. My wife and I and our families have been pretty lucky in terms of illness or financial disruption, but I think it’s sobering, and permanently resets your outlook, to realize that something like this can actually happen. You read about shortages and bread lines and serious economic disruptions as things that happen in other countries. Thank God the disruption has not been all that severe, but it almost feels like we’re getting a taste of just how bad things can get.

Anyway, I’m wondering if anyone else has felt anything like this? Are your memories from the pandemic hazier or less well-formed than those from before? Has it felt not just odd or disruptive, but like an actual break with normal experience, or with the rest of your life?

One more thing: I always, obviously, hope you click the “Related Reading” pieces, but this time I’ve added a couple more than usual. These are all pieces where I’ve tried to explore the weirdness of living through the pandemic, and I’m curious to probe and document people’s experiences. So send an email or drop a comment!

Related Reading:

The Great Unsettledness

Do Not Re-Enter?

The Salad Bar and the International Supermarket

Route 1 in Two Years

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