I don’t know when you mark the beginning of the pandemic - it seems to be different for everyone - but for me it was March 13; my last day in the office for a while. So we’re coming up on a year of this and oh, what a year it’s been.

I don’t know how to view time anymore. I don’t know how to process it. The past year has lasted a lifetime at the same time it seems like a blank slate we haven’t lived through yet, that we forgot to move forward from March 12th and we need to lurch forward and move down the tracks to try and catch up.

It’s been almost a year of nothingness, a year of bleakness chasing us down and finally catching up with us. A year with no birthday parties or big weddings, no graduation ceremonies, with stripped down holidays. There was no dining out, no movie theater excursions, no PTA meetings or hockey games. There was nothing but staying in your home, maybe going to the grocery store on a Saturday morning.

I went back to work in early May, part time at first, then full days but working from home one day a week. I feel like I was one of the lucky ones who got to get out of the house every day, even if it was to go to a small office where I saw no one else all day. But even with those hours at the office, life remained a big old slice of nothingness. We were stuck, relegated to the couch where we watched a lot of television, cooking shows, Aerial America, Jeopardy!, 24 hour news channels where graphics showing just how bad things were greeted us every morning. We stared blankly at times, just spacing out in front of the tv, retreating further into ourselves as putting ourselves out there - conversationally, emotionally - became exhausting.

We puttered around the house, fixing little things that needed our attention, taking on big projects, but never working on ourselves. We were stagnating, withering away, the pandemic and the societal lockdown wearing us down until we became silent, unyielding in our quietness. The way the world came to a halt became more about us as time went on; we mimicked the path of the virus, masking up both figuratively and literally, shutting down, sending out waves of panic.

Outside, everything was a standstill. We mourned the concerts we were missing, dates passing with a deep sigh, a cry of “I was supposed to be at this show tonight” punching the air, our desperation to feel any kind of normalcy turning increasingly manic. We were slowly going insane.

With nothing to do and nowhere to go, we turned inward. We retreated, gave up. Sleep was a refuge, a space where it was ok to be silent and still. Our dreams at first offered a respite, taking us outside our confinement, but soon the dreams became nightmares, hellscapes about the end of the world, about maskless people, about the deaths of thousands, about a great big nothing overtaking us. We started waking at 3am, unable or unwilling to sleep anymore.

The hours trickled by and turned into days and the days turned into weeks without us noticing. It was May. It was June. The usual markings of the change of seasons, the turns of the calendar page, were suspiciously absent. There was no Memorial Day barbecue. There was no Father’s Day dinner. Time just passed unceremoniously, days blending into each other, and we were never sure when we woke in the morning exactly what day it was.

But time marches on with or without us and suddenly we were staring down the end of summer and thinking about winter with a virus present. We were thinking about being shut in by cold and snow and not just a pandemic. We were thinking the days of walking around the block to clear your head were almost done. And the things there were to look forward to - Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas - were threatening to look decidedly different this time around. Nothing was normal. We wondered if we would ever feel normal again.

We’d look back to March, to the beginning of things and wonder just where all that time between now and then went. What did we do? Did we do anything besides sit here and become different versions of ourselves? We were quieter, more withdrawn, on edge, tired, ready to give up. Gone were the conversations about work, about our days, because our days were all the same. Gone was desire: desire to read, desire to cook, to clean, to mount any kind of defense in the face of the walls closing in on us. We got the point where we let it happen, let those walls tumble down and crush us. We really had no option; this is what we were heading toward all along.

It’s almost a year now and things have not progressed at all, at least not emotionally, mentally. There are vaccines, we are working toward becoming a functioning society again. But what of us? What of the people this pandemic has left behind, the people whose entire personalities have changes, whose mental state is in desperate need of repair. What of the relationships shattered by all the silence, the stagnation? What of us? How do we reconcile this? We are irrevocably changed. We have lost more than time - for so many of us, we have lost ourselves.