Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day One Hundred Thirty Eight

Before the grippe reborn’s shadow returned to this world my love and I had intended to visit her family in the eastern isles. As we booked hotels in January we heard the first whispers of the dread lord’s return. I dismissed the matter, as so many did in those early days. Every year there is word of some plague arising and only rarely do they consume the entire planet, and even then it takes some months. If it came to these parts I thought it would be in the fall.

At the beginning of February we went to a travel clinic to make certain our vaccines were up to date. The nurse told us then she didn’t think we would be going, yet I thought she was being overly cautious. Even though it was clear by then that the grippe reborn had fully regained his powers, I still believed that power could be muted, slowed and contained. How utterly blind it all seems now. By the end of the month we cancelled the trip and by the end of March the quarantine protocols were in place.

The speed of it all was blinding and the disorientation from it all persists, especially as the quarantine time slows down and the future beyond the grippe reborn’s shadow remains distant. I wonder when we will be able to go on that trip. Not this year certainly, or the next.

When we finally do, I suspect it will be much more expensive. For a long time companies have been trying to make travel, even locally, as cheap as possible, by offering little to customers, paying their employees as little as possible, and serving as many people as they possibly could. How feasible will that model be in two years time?

There are so many things where businesses and whole industries are just trying to survive, to make it through the year. The fundamentals that they based their business on have crumbled and nothing new has been built in its place. What happens if they have to make it through another somehow? Many won’t. Some will adapt. As will we. There will be things we don’t return to, though I hope to see the eastern isles myself, to sit upon a beach at sunrise.