When reflecting on this past year of pandemic life, I see it in fleeting moments, images, impressions, a flip book that has lost its pages. A haze descends on my memory of time spent locked away for so long, half a year at home in Ohio where the sun was unkind and so was I, half a year in the apartment in Hyde Park where I learned to hate the green mohair couches and Ikea dining table. Hair grew long, clawed its way down my neck and then it was time to buy an electric razor. Meals were cooked and eaten and the dishes were cleaned, classes were taken laying in bed with the lights off. These moments and memories are not special. They are compressed in my mind, a dull hum that won’t go away but will never show it’s true face. I sit here on the quad as I write this, bathing in the summer heat and falling pollen that accelerates us into normalcy, normalcy that we are not prepared for, normalcy that will never be normal. This acceleration feels clear and present, as does the other acceleration which bookended this pandemic life, the acceleration in the first moments of the pandemic. Not an acceleration but a tumble. The tumble of March 2020, the close of Winter Quarter when students were evacuated from campus, tears shared in cramped dorm rooms, long silent car rides home in the dark. This was a tumble we all shared, inciting feelings of panic, despair, denial, rage. The world splintered around us, and we were left to try to put the pieces back together.

Our group elected to immortalize this descent into panic, into uncertainty, through a preservation of the digital world we engaged with during the earliest moments of the pandemic. This pandemic was a time engaged with over cell phones and laptop computers, and it only felt right to persevere those artifacts buried deep in camera rolls and cloud storage. We have compiled a zine of images, screenshots, and text selections from March-April 2020, constructing a loose digital timeline of the outset of the pandemic. The assembled document is at once deeply personal and universal. Text messages between family members, tweets, Facebook posts, emails announcing distanced learning. Here are captured moments of panic, desperation, humor, care, compressed into the rectangles of our cell phone and laptop screens. We assembled this zine with the intention of preserving experiences and impressions that will not be preserved otherwise. While newspaper archives and public records of COVID-19 will presumably be intact in 100 years, the personal documents of a world descending into apocalypse will be lost to the incessant stream of tweets, screenshots, text messages, email chains.

We hope that this assembled zine will show a viewer in 2120 the personal realities of panic and confusion in the face of immense global crisis. Let this be a document not simply of loss and fear, but rather of our resiliency, our ability to adapt to the fragmentation of our lives and emerge stronger and better equipped for an uncertain future.