Today is June 2nd, 2021. The school year is almost over, summer is here (almost) and a post-COVID life becomes ever more solid in the distance ahead. But back in March last year, the world felt very different. Over the span of what felt like a weekend, it seemed like the whole world flipped on its head. Restaurants were shutting down, classes were getting cancelled, jobs and internships were getting postponed; there was a level of uncertainty in all of our lives that had never existed before. None of us had any idea what to expect and how we should be preparing for what comes next. It feels like the start of the pandemic was a particular moment in time where everyone in the world – for a brief moment – was going through the same thing. Everyone was in the same boat. Mind you, it wasn’t a particularly fun boat, but if there’s any experience we could look at as something that we all shared in recent times, it’s COVID and specifically, it’s that stomach-churning feeling we all had on the 12th of March, 2020.

So as a team, we’ve decided to add something to this time capsule that documents that feeling at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve designed a collage that highlights all the moments where each of us felt the impact of COVID in some way. Maybe it was sports getting cancelled or a favourite restaurant shutting down or classes moving to Zoom (in fact, I know that was a big one for all of us), there were moments that we all went through that brought to the fore the idea that COVID-19 was very much here and in our lives. We’ve found a newspaper frontpage from the 12th of March last year and we’ve placed onto that all the channels and announcements through which COVID-19 became real to us. Emails from the school, newspaper headlines announcing the cancellation of sports, texts between friends and families, travel ban announcements, all of it is on here. Basically, anything (both formal and informal channels) that signalled a change from the norm because of COVID. I remember specifically thinking it was a big deal that Tom Hanks got COVID. No longer was this something that existed only on the other side of the world, this was something that even my beloved Tom Hanks had to face (because celebrities are special, surely). But we’ve all had moments like that this past year, when we were forced to stare straight at COVID, forced to acknowledge its existence. Sure these moments were different in some ways, personal to us of course, but yet in a weird way, we also all had the same experience and we wanted to create an object that captured that.

It is hard to be sure what the world looks like 100 years from now. It is hard to explain to someone from 2120 why a pandemic from 2020 should feel important to them. But speaking as someone from June 2021, it did feel important to me, it still feels important to all of us. It is certainly a year we’ll all remember for some time yet and whether or not the world from 2120 is better equipped to deal with the uncertainty and fear that came from the start of this pandemic, that does not diminish the shared global experience we’ve just had. For a brief moment, we all sat on the same dystopian boat staring out into an uncertain future, and while as a collective and individually, we’ve all come a significant way since then, I’m not sure a lot of us will forget that feeling the morning of March 12th, 2020.