If, in five years, you ask me what I remember about our second pandemic winter, I wonder what I’ll say. In early 2022, stuck at home as Omicron cases rose in Ontario, my roommate and I spent time trading stories of our core memories from the previous few years—probably having drawn subliminal inspiration from the “core memories” TikTok trend that emerged around that time. As part of the trend, TikTok users set video clips of treasured life moments to a nostalgic instrumental soundtrack, with the audio run through an echo filter to make it sound drawn from a dream. While neither of us made one of those TikToks, we do both have vivid mental highlight reels from our first few years at the University of Toronto, where we were midway through our undergraduate degrees when the pandemic hit. One of my favourite memory overlaps was a housewarming party we threw in 2019 at a previous address—our living room alive with chatter, our kitchen filled with friends dancing to Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” on the twenty-first night of September. But we didn’t talk much about the year and a half that we spent taking online classes from our parents’ homes, feeling like we were living a single day on loop. Even now, a rare pandemic anecdote will surface in my mind, and I’ll struggle to pinpoint what year it’s from. The summers of 2020 and 2021 often blur together in my mind.
Because of those gaps in my recollection, I spent that slow, quiet winter punctuating my weeks with things I hoped I would remember doing. I photographed, I wrote, I did everything I could to maintain a record of my existence at that point in time. It didn’t feel like enough. In the fall, I had returned two planters to Structube, but by January, I had no memory of doing so. My roommate was pretty sure I did it, though she couldn’t remember if it was one or two planters. Did I? Was that me? I’ve always been absent minded, but what I felt that winter was new. I was twenty-one and couldn’t help but think that this shouldn’t be happening to me.
