In the last few weeks I’ve had more conversations about the first year of Covid than in the last three years.

It’s like we held our breath, not wanting to say “That was weird right? And hard? Not just me, right?” just in case suddenly someone jumped out from behind a tree and said “What do you mean “was” fools?! Get back in your houses, we’re going full lock-down again!”

But now we’ve reached a full three years later. Or… I mean, it’s not a precise thing. But it’s coming up on three years since San Francisco issued shelter in place orders and we locked ourselves in the house for a bunch of months, then lived cautiously and frustratedly and weirdly for a bunch of a bunch more.

And it’s only recently that people have started to talk about it. Someone asked the other day Doozer and I were walking home with his friend from school and he suddenly said
“Hey, do you remember that day when the sky was red?”
“Oh.” said his friend. “Yeah it was weird. Why?” 

“Oh nothing.” said Doozer. “That’s all it was. That day that felt like we were on Mars. We called it Mars day. Just wondering if you remembered it.”

How weird it is that that’s going to be one of his childhood memories? The day the sun didn’t rise and the birds didn’t sing and the sky was dark red all day. And he’d been unable to attend school for 8 months, and had changed school, and hadn’t yet met any of his new classmates… and not knowing that even when he would meet them, another couple of months later, he wouldn’t get to see the bottom half of their faces for most of another year. Or a whole other year?

Crumbs.

And I realise that was not a universal experience. It was a thing that happened in San Francisco and the Bay Area — a confluence of smoke from wildfires and atmospheric pressure and… stuff? Whatever it was, we all got up one morning and the sun… didn’t.

The light couldn’t get through the clouds. The birds didn’t sing. We all dialled into our zoom meetings from our home offices in different parts of the city and just sort of… stared at each other. We’d been sheltering in place for … I don’t know, six months at that point?

It absolutely, thoroughly broke me. Nothing at that point mattered. I couldn’t talk about work, I couldn’t talk about enterprise software particularly, because I didn’t give a shit and because IT DIDN’T MATTER. How could it possibly matter? There was no sun in the sky! It was pitch dark — well, pitch dark red — at 11am. What could matter anymore.

I tried to take a picture for posterity, but the camera kept correcting the light, like technology was conspiring to make sure we couldn’t quite remember what it was like. And, as previously written, I couldn’t find the words to write about it at the time because to write about it as extraordinary seemed to be tempting fate, and if I did then, well, before we knew it there would be whole weeks like it. Maybe it would just be normal. Like being in our house. Seeing only each other. Having birthday parties on zoom. All of that nonsense.

It wasn’t even the first time my brain had broken that year.
Of course it wasn’t. It was just another in a series of brain breakdowns.

The main one before that had been the Everlasting Tuesday. 

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I’d been doing personal training with a friend for a long time before the pandemic. We used to go before work, or after work, when the office was nearby. Our trainer was firm enough to make sure we worked out, but lenient enough to be ok with the fact that our jobs were stupid and stressful and we often had to reschedule at the last minute or would sometimes just burst into tears in the middle of a deadlift.

So when the pandemic came, and lots of her clients disappeared, we kept training. But on zoom.

We’d work out on a Tuesday. I’d change into my workout gear, prop the computer on a chair in the spare room at an angle that meant I could see her and she could mainly see me, but she definitely couldn’t see when I was only half doing my hip-dips, and I’d unroll my mat and gather resistance bands and for 45 minutes we’d all remotely work out together… and then close the computer and be on our own again, each in our own spaces, back to the closed doors and the masked interactions and the leaving of delivery food at the front gate before ringing the bell and running away.

One Tuesday, I was there, in the spare room,  with the laptop propped on a chair, with the mat rolled out, wearing my workout clothes, listening to tinny music coming from our trainer’s speakers on the other end of a zoom.

And it must have been that I was wearing the same workout clothes as the Tuesday before. And the laptop was at exactly the same angle as the Tuesday before. And the sun coming through the window blinded me in exactly the same moment of the same exercise as the same song was playing that was playing the Tuesday before.

And suddenly I was whirling inside a deja vu, but it wasn’t a short-circuit deja vu, and it wasn’t a deja vu as in “I was feeling like I was doing the same thing but had never done it before”. I had done it before. I had done all of it before. Exactly the same. Or maybe I hadn’t? No… no, I had. I’d done it on other Tuesdays. In fact, maybe this was the other Tuesdays.

In that moment, I suddenly couldn’t remember which Tuesday I was in.
It was definitely Tuesday, but I felt like I was concurrently in this Tuesday and last Tuesday and maybe the Tuesday before and probably next Tuesday too.
I was in all the Wednesdays at once, and there was also no such thing as Tuesdays… there was only Tuesday. Singular. I was, in that moment, living in The Tuesday.
The Tuesday that stretched in front of me and behind me as far as I could see, and yet was also just here, right here, under me and inside me, being the only Tuesday, and no particular Tuesday.

I asked my friend and our coach to give me a moment, and went downstairs to find my beloved. I asked him if I was really there, in front of him. And whether it was this Tuesday, or next Tuesday, or last Tuesday. And whether, perhaps, our spare room was a time travel portal? Or a tear in the space/time continuum.

And he gave me a hug. And asked whether I was maybe a little bit stoned. And, finding out I was not, told me that maybe, this Tuesday, I should give the exercise a break and have a nap. Or, for that matter, just have a gummy and *be* stoned, because it was probably the only way I was going to enjoy this experience rather than… whatever this was.

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I don’t know what Doozer will remember from the lost year. I don’t know if he ever had a moment that was equivalent to my Everlasting Tuesday. But if he does, it’s probably Mars Day. And I hope to mars and back that it’s the only one he ever sees.