What It Was Like (Assad)

At the age of nine, in a Hello Kitty diary, I wrote about simple things like going to the Convenient Food Mart with my mom, receiving troll dolls for my birthday, and having a “soar throat.” Decades later, I flip through these pages that contain my attempts at cursive interspersed with mementos laminated securely with Scotch tape. Since my earliest diaries, I’ve believed I could pour my mind onto page after page and, in so doing, never forget anything or anyone I held dear.

Maybe that’s why my journal writing has been even more consistent over the last five months. My digital version has gained over thirty thousand words since early March. I want to hold on to everything and everyone I love in the face of whatever is coming. I also want to remember how I felt in certain moments, what I thought, what I did, because I know too well that time has a way of softening the sharpness and dulling the edges of even our most cherished memories.

Writing in a pandemic is unlike any writing I’ve ever done in my life. I’m not writing academic articles (though I should be working on two, according to my to-do list). I’m not writing a dissertation or crafting feedback to students on their own projects. I’m writing about the day-to-day business of observing the world around me. Sometimes these moments seem mundane, while other times they feel monumental or revealing.  

I can picture my future grandchildren discovering a trunk full of dusty, fragile, yet still intact journals full of my words. Some paragraphs are handwritten yet others are in neat serif, single-spaced with one-inch margins and tucked into binders. Each entry is dated, and there are mysterious gaps in time that the grandchildren — old enough to know they should handle the pages with care — wonder about and try to theorize. They’ll think being in one’s thirties is so old, but they don’t know they’ll change their minds after turning twenty-nine.

They’ll put their latest technological gadgets to the side (whatever those might be by then) and huddle together to read about walks at the park that sustained me during the earliest months of the pandemic; advice their great-grandparents had given me when I was feeling stressed; amusing conversations I’d had with students; compliments that had brightened a challenging day. Words that were my own, peppered with words others had spoken to me. They’ll read about the time their grandfather and I went to the grocery store to find a line by the door before it had opened, empty shelves, limits on how many eggs we could purchase. Few people were wearing masks at that point, and so we tried to keep far enough away from others. I’d carefully leaned between other shoppers twice my age, trying to pick out the best onions as quickly as possible without exhaling too much, just in case. A man in another aisle coughed without covering as I’d approached; I grabbed a bag of noodles for my soup and hurried away.

Their eyes would scan the lines I’d immortalized on paper, intended mostly for me but also, just maybe, for others years later: others I may know for a brief time, or not at all. If I could have just one more conversation with my grandparents — this time as an adult — there are so many words of theirs I’d want to absorb, stow away to revisit years later.  Instead, I trace their signatures on birthday cards from the ‘90s before returning them to their archival safe boxes.

Even if that trunk never exists, or if it does exist but no one opens it, I know I need to keep writing. I need to see my thoughts unfold, take shape, and return to me on the page. Sometimes I wake up and forget that we’re living and writing in a pandemic, but other days I wake up and shake off another dream about failing to wear a mask, or entering an overly crowded space and not being able to leave, or learning someone I know is sick.

It’s not always easy to determine which moments deserve ink. Occasionally, I type out a few sentences and then erase them, realizing I’d be just fine with letting that memory fade slowly away. Other times I force myself to write about unpleasant emotions and experiences because the process of writing is also a process of healing. In the act of writing, we observe, untangle, and re-create.

If years from now, someone asks me what it was like to live through this pandemic, I know I’ll have page upon page of memories I can consult to locate all the details. I’ll print them out, back them up, keep them close. But I also hope to simply close my eyes and remember what it felt like to move the pen across the page, or to tap at my aging keyboard with its fading and invisible characters. Day by day, week after week, month after month, shaping thoughts and moments into words that may one day be relics.

Mary K. Assad earned her PhD in English from Case Western Reserve University, where she now teaches writing and serves as an advisor to international students.