What is the Temporality of a Pandemic?
In late July last year, my family loaded up our car with soft-bodied suitcases, pillows and hiking shoes and headed to our cabin, a few hours north of Edmonton, Canada. For me, this was a bit of an extended holiday on an already extensive “holiday”. I had moved home to Edmonton from my basement apartment in Toronto at the onset of the pandemic. The prospect of spending (what I thought was going to be) a few weeks to a month holed up in my room, mourning the normal errancy and buzz of city life, home-cooked dinners with friends, and sunlight, seemed like too much to bear. I was lucky that my parents wanted me home and was allured by the thought of watching the river valley thaw out.
The weeks piled up, as I, like everyone, stayed put. What also started to pile was grief. A friend was diagnosed with a chronic illness and then another friend’s dad passed away. Then there was a mass shooting in Nova Scotia (where my family is originally from). Then my relationship ended. I also started to grieve my old life- the life I had been trying to carve out in a new city, beginning the arduous and exciting path of a doctorate, and establishing community. All the while, covid-19 spread like a wildfire blown by a particularly malevolent wind. We all grabbed for our life rafts.
By the time late July came around, I had been in Edmonton for four months- the longest I had been at home since I had left for college at 18. The years of 18 to 25 are catapults, with each year weighted with extraordinary events. The first times decorating your own space with fairy lights, cheap textiles and sofas pulled from the street, then falling asleep piled in that living room, drunk, after existential conversations and dancing. The first times spreading “gender is a social construct” like the gospel then wrangling that and all the other good learning you did in college into a paying job. The first times falling deeply in love and playing out some realizable but hazy vision of a future with that person, replete with dogs and Structube furniture, then seeing whether or not your life actually rolls in that direction. The first times being so very aware of the freedoms that you can afford yourself, and then gaining the know-how of when to indulge and when to curl back.
During the first lockdown, time seemed to furl itself around the small habits and movements I made through the day- from my bed to the dinner table to my computer (propped either on the dinner table or the sofa or my bed) to the running loop around the river to the dinner table to my bed. During this period, I read a poem by Bronwen Brenner. In it, she compares an imprint to depression. How do you get rid of an imprint, or concaved space?
Under a principle of space-time, the closer you are to a heavy object, the slower that time seems to pass. Following the steps of grief management, we move from a depression to a “upward turn”. Space folds convex, and we can slide off of it and skirt away. Time, if we could imagine the space-time image of the mattress and the bowling ball overturned, would also jaunt outwards. With a global pandemic drawing us into our home-spaces, where do we find the convex?
Earlier in July, articles started appearing suggesting that we look out for comet Neowise, that was passing through our skies over the next month. NASA anthropomorphized this comet as a survivor because on its closest orbit to the sun, Neowise didn’t dissolve like most comets do. Scientists think that this is both because Neowise has a sturdy structure, and because it only ventures close to the sun for a very short time, relative to its lifespan.
On the second or third night at the cabin, my family and I padded down to the lake barefoot, and watched the sun burn and then fall into the water. We tipped our heads back and made wishes on the first glints that we saw in the sky. Then we saw the daytime exhale and appreciated how magnificently the stars shone in the woods. We traced with our eyes a line from the big dipper’s lowest star, and sure enough, spotted Neowise. It was amorphous and beady, like most stars. What caught our eyes was its sloped tail. With that, it seemed to be leaping into the night.
I only looked out for the comet that night, even though it continued to be visible until the end of July. We were doing our thing, and it was doing its own. Part of the appeal of Neowise, I read in every article, was that after this month, it wouldn’t be close enough for us to spot for another 7800 years. 7800 years is so beyond a human life that it feels meaningless. The claim itself also seems brash. Who is to say that the comet won’t get too close to another unforeseen hot object, in a decade or sixty, and sizzle out?
I think that with a comet, all that we can really experience about its existence happens during the few days or weeks or months that it is passing through our sky. During this time, because of its peculiarity, it can seem very close. I can imagine that the months people endured during the bubonic plague and the Spanish Influenza must have been some of the most unsettling of their lives- both because of the losses and disruptions incurred by the disease, and then also because of all of the events that were re-storied during this time, that couldn’t be understood until the virus had passed through.
Both of these pandemics weren’t destined to remain in orbit of human lifespans for very long. They made imprints, but then rolled on. Now, they get recalled when a similar event occurs.
Looking out at the night sky can feel like a convex act. As can biking fast in the rain, or laying in a city park, at a proper distance from your friends, and letting the August sun burn you, and affirm to you how sturdy you are, and endless you can be.