There is a photograph in my camera roll. It displays a scene of myself, my twin brother and one of my cousins taking a selfie in front of a frequently played game board. We are smiling, as the latter member had recently arrived to visit from her campus. Earlier that day, in my last class, I had received a slip of paper from the school saying that we would have two weeks off. The person who sat next to me with a name I conveniently cannot remember leaned towards me and said something to the tune of “Must be nice to get two weeks off from class before your birthday, huh?” I probably laughed and replied “Yep.” What an utter fool I was, unknowing of the absolute virtual mess slowly approaching. And now you might be wondering why on absolute Earth I would start this article describing a random photograph in my phone. Like, who gives a crap, right? Wrong. There is something particularly special about this photo, the date that it was taken — March 13, 2020. Bam! Throwback, right?
Over 700 days later, I am just halfway through university with absolutely no clue how I got here in the first place. Did I travel in time? Did a wormhole open above Grounds and drop me and the class of 2024 into our dorm rooms? The spiraling mess of 2020 and the years that followed it have whizzed by so quickly that my head can barely compute the memories. Four semesters have passed by, and quite frankly, I do not remember much of it all. But this semester was different, in a sort of way. While in-person classes have been back since last semester, masks have been dropping during this one. Anxiety, while still a factor in peoples’ lives, is lowered. And while COVID-19 continues to spit out new variants, the saliva testing center has closed. Many refer to this phenomenon as a return to normalcy.
So, this semester was unlike those prior during the pandemic — as time has passed, this semester has marked a more prevalent return to some level of normalcy. I would argue that things will never be as they were before, but that is a whole other can of worms to open. Classes commenced in-person, the mask mandate was removed and crowds of people returned for Days on the Lawn. But there is a similarity, I would argue, between this semester and the three that came before it. And I am not talking about anyone who holds a Zoom meeting still saying “I really suck at using this,” even after using it for ages on ages. No, I am talking about time. I honestly can not get my head around its passage anymore. Weeks have passed during this semester, and yet I feel as if no time has passed at all. Perhaps a few of you would agree with me that time has truly now become a construct. Please, allow me to elaborate.
We know that in general, time moves forward. This is a fact. As a STEM major, I can verify this with an error of 5 percent. Yet, in a way, I still feel like I’m sitting on the floor of my home with my brother and cousin playing a board game over two years ago. No longer can I track time by normal means. Events, deadlines and trends have become my marker. There were phases of quarantine in the very beginning, as if life was one humongous Marvel Universe series. I am both ashamed and prideful to admit I baked a lot of bread, up until the trend passed by and I latched onto binging TV shows with a feverish passion.
However, in the deep abyss of my mind, I know that time has genuinely passed and it is entirely impossible that I manifested on Grounds in January, and that everything that happened in between now simply whooshed by faster than the speed of light. Things happened, I am sure they did, and yet it is as if nothing happened at all.
So I ask this single question. It is a very important question. Are we living in a paradox, or has the construct of time itself become obsolete? I am not sure I have the answer. Maybe this is all in my head.
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