October 16, 2020

When I was a child, my mom described a road trip through California she took with my older sister where the hours passed incredibly slow. They traveled some mathematically unlikely distance for how long they drove: a time warp, she would say. I remember heating food in the microwave and watching the seconds, my mom telling me the time warp was proved by Einstein, who proved some moments last longer than others.

I remember things like this more often now: new memories, a friend calls them. Before, I had not realized I was making memories all the time. Now, I realize how many moments still exist inside me, with potential, random maybe, to be felt again. I will wash the dishes, and smell soap from being small somewhere I no longer know, somewhere I went once. Late at night, talking with my roommate, I find myself in her memories: a forbidden field she played in as a child, a yellow house that no longer stands. At different places, but nearly the same times, we were both children: my soap washed as her yellow house stood.

It is the same feeling for me, as I explore the lives of this website’s contributors. As Jessica Bishop-Royce writes of her space feeling smaller each day, and that the untidiness of her family confined to home wears on her, I think of my home too. I hear Yasmin Bashir’s voice speak of vulnerability, anger, and anonymity as she is cat-called on the street after a jog wearing her face mask for the first time. I watch Matthew Owens’ quarantine puppet theater be born to adapt to the loss of his job at the Brookfield Zoo. After months, a meticulously detailed and giant rubber rat flea (resembling the species responsible for the bubonic plague) now sits on a table somewhere in his home; occupying a place where he has pushed this moment from his mind and into the world around us.

Some moments leave incredibly quickly. Over the summer, though the sun went down late at night, whole days would pass me by on the hot pavement shore of 31st beach in one hour. I have never been so lost in time as now, yet met so many others in this same timeless place.

Each day I feel I am remembering a new memory, how it felt to be alive yesterday. To be in awe of all of the change, exhaustion of happenings collectively, pain of losing every certainty the past held, with only the instability of presence as company.

Along the words of so many contributors of this site, who are fearing, but willing now to believe in what motivates beyond that of ourselves alone; what could it be, after all this is done? For those of us experiencing the world’s current events in real time: the “weeks of decades happening,” there is valuable work to be done in sharing honestly, so that this persistent moment may be remembered for how it was.