Twenty-Five minutes is rooted in early pandemic time. The waxing and waning of its publication inadvertently following the phases of the pandemic. 11 March 2024 marks four years since the start of the pandemic. 5 May 2023 a year since the character shift to it no longer being a global health emergency. These anniversaries are like journal prompts, calling Jenny and I to write again. We are still working out what our writing schedule will look like, but expect that twenty-five minutes will be with you at least four times a year, on a combination of anniversaries and dates that we pick as our own markers.
mehrunnisa
memory comes to me and at me, especially in this time of digital debris. i figured out how to disable the reminders on cloud storage. a growing retreat from virtual social spaces took care of the rest. but even so, reminders crop up by themselves, the most recent being photographs on the memory card of my digital camera that i had forgotten to erase after the initial transfer.
here was a past life that had no purchase in the present.
on the eleventh of march a daily newsletter dropped into my inbox. its title ‘four years ago today’ prompted immediate opening. the day was the fourth anniversary of the covid pandemic. the date appeared in bold and under it, a simple sentence of impact. ‘four years ago today, society began to shut down.’ eleventh of march was a declaration of status. the day that covid was characterised as a global pandemic by the world health organisation. the tract of time between then and the fifth of may twenty twenty three featured a dizzying array of lockdowns, variants and vaccines, political scandals and eventually a shift in character when the same organisation declared an end to covid as a global health emergency. all this in addition to the regular transmission of current affairs.
the world health organisation is part of the united nations family. it works on public health issues around the world of which epidemics are part and parcel. there is a vocabulary of mandates, constitutions and governance that sits behind this power. and yet, i question who gets to choose these dates and define character. anniversaries are markers of time. gatekeepers of before, after and the middle. they seem firm but for me they share a commonality with borders in their reliance on power and documentary paraphernalia to mark stake.
time and memory are slippery. the latter is plagued by inconsistency. memory is a social act. it needs to be retold and shared with the people who it was made with to keep it alive. but the retelling also layers it with other stories. a part of it is consistent. the rest is both fact and fiction. and then there is time. rovelli’s ‘the order of time’ - a clipped, concise and poetic volume uses science to explain how little is known about it. whatever we conceive of it is contrary to how it works.
time, like memory, is relational.
jenny and i started twenty-five minutes for the love of archive and capture. we wanted to grasp memory, the idea being that it would not evade us if we wrote it in or as close to its happening. what does such a record mean?
as i read through the archive of our posts, i am reminded more of the omissions and absences rather than what is present in the words. i wrote so little of the individual fear of illness, especially the risk of blood clots from covid and some of the vaccines that were meant to lessen its severity. the early stages of the pandemic took me back to the very bleak years of recovering from the extensive damage of blood clots in my leg and lungs. my story was classic in many ways. i was faced with health care that is terrible at caring for women. a situation made worse by the fact that my symptoms were atypical. add to this the belief that youth and chronic illness are not meant to be bedfellows. i wanted to do everything that i could to protect myself from disease. a fact complicated by the negotiation of care in spaces where mask wearing was seen as trespass on freedom, and the unknowns on what actually worked against this new contagion.
i do not know why i silenced myself. editing my fear as ruthlessly as i do my creative writing. what then is memory when it is half the story?
Jenny
Mehrunnisa tells me that it’s been a year since the WHO declared the end of the pandemic as a global emergency. It’s not as though we’re short of global emergencies — there’s a pandemic of them — but COVID’s dropping off the list speaks to its receding, not in horrible effect and after-effect but in time and the public face, at least, of the public mind. I think that some people will themselves amnesiac, and some people enforce forgetting on others. Then there’s the rest of us, thinking lots but saying little.
This is why we wrote.
“I can’t forget, but I don’t remember what”, said Leonard Cohen. I can go back in lockdown time, but only in episodes, which is absolutely not how I experienced the time. It’s not the remembering that takes the effort but forgetting for a moment what we know now about vaccines and variants and risk and recovery and how those of us who came through managed to do it.
Also, it’s just hard to meet head-on. Mehrunnisa has been much stronger than I have in rereading old posts and researching official records. I need to build my fitness for reading and writing, the mental equivalent of marathon training, and I want to: I will. What we learn now, whether from the WHO, the Government, the COVID inquiry or our own instinctively adopted coping strategies in the face of the new normal, does reframe our past lives. But it’s that thought that puts me back in the moment of the pandemic, because in turn it makes me think, as I did in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023: it’s not over.
This is why we write.