COVID memoir

91 days. That’s all it took to rewrite my understanding of the world I thought I had created and controlled. I remember walking through the front door of our condo building, heading to our office, no cars on busy 4th Ave, no store, coffee shop, or restaurant open. No one on the street but me. The city was abandoned, and yet I felt watched.

The person I had spent the most time with up until that point was, and still is my co-founder. We built a routine over two decades: morning meetings, back-alley brainstorms, his coffee order and mine, all honed in the way only time can do. He took those first few months, mandates, distancing, avoiding public places-and me. Sure, it wasn’t me me. It still felt like it.

Covid, the pandemic, those years, the thoughts and feelings, are almost impossible to ignore in conversation now. Some are sick of hearing about it. For some, it’s a blur. Some didn’t make it through.

I still hold space for the nostalgia I felt up until March 2020, when I was sure of my life, the city I loved, and the people I surrounded myself with. Now, coming up on six years later, I can’t believe how far I’ve raced past the life I lived with such conviction. From Seattle to Arizona to NYC, lightly flirting abroad. Selfishly, as of this writing, it’s the first time I’ve felt settled. Or am I?

Would I go back to the way life was pre-March 2020? Yes. Point blank. Full stop.

What does it mean to want something back that no longer exists?

Will life ever be that again? For me, yes, but in smaller pockets, stretched across the globe. And still, I hold the nostalgia.

I’m writing this because I know I’m not the only one carrying a version of pandemic grief, coping, or confusion. Push-up challenges. Virtual liquor shots. Cutting friends’ hair. Grocery shopping during assigned hours, following taped arrows through supermarkets. Being yelled at for not wearing a mask in the park. One person at a time in elevators. Restaurants bending themselves into knots to follow rules. Boarded-up cities.

Too many false starts at returning to the office left people thinking more about their own lives than the teams, companies, and capitalism that paid their checks. Stimulus checks and loan forgiveness saved businesses, and left a small dent of entitlement in some. Money didn’t trickle down so much as pool, stagnating enough to maintain operations, not grow.

Hospitality workers earning $22 an hour realized they could make double that in construction, or, in some cases, doing nothing at all except gambling in the casino of capitalism: NFTs, crypto, the stock market boom that arrived mid-pandemic. I watched friends quietly move out of their homes. Realize they didn’t need or want to spend time with coworkers beyond the work itself. No one talked about it directly. People just adjusted to their own versions of reality.

Humans of Earth, share your Covid memoir. I read one in The New Yorker about a girlfriend and her boyfriend in NYC willingly locked together in a city frozen after its last rave, his slow downward spiral, the quiet end of their relationship. Thinking about it now makes me want to reread it.

None of us came out untouched. Kids missed senior year. People lost loved ones they weren’t allowed to see in hospitals. Nurses absorbed fear, exhaustion, and politics while doing impossible work in an echo chamber. I didn’t live inside that fear, but I lived close enough through family to feel its weight.

There is comfort in sharing these stories, if only to connect us.

Here’s a stupid, funny thing we did. Liquor stores were considered essential, remember that designation? Every Friday-ish, we’d drive 1.7 miles to the liquor store, buy Clase Azul Blanco, open it immediately, and take several shots on the way home to catch a buzz (before making it home). We did it so often we don’t drink Clase Azul anymore. It was our way of compressing time, of proving that Friday still meant something.

What’s your story?