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 Seven Hundred Thirty

Today marks the second anniversary of when I began to chronicle the events following the Dread Lord Grippe Reborn’s arrival in these parts. I remember those strange first days vividly. The disorienting timelessness as our daily lives dwindled while the news of the Dread Lord’s spread was ceaseless. We went for walks through the shuttered community and there were signs for St. Patrick’s Day celebrations that never came that stayed up for months. It is harder to recall the weeks or months leading up to his arrival. The day to day ebb and flow of our lives has been lost. That world and those lives are like a distant epoch now. We can never return to it.

Now with inoculations and our other defences against the Dread Lord there is hope that we can resume something like that existence again. It will be different, of course, how could it not be. We have all been changed by the past two years and there is no returning to what was. The roads back are lost and overgrown. We can only carve a new path.

The Grippe Reborn is still here though and will be a part of our lives going forward. His power will ebb and flow, but we know now what is needed to hold him at bay. I am sure there are nasty surprises still in store, but nothing like those first panic-stricken days, when dread and uncertainty ruled. We know what he is now and that means so much.

The protests in our neighbourhood are also still a part of our lives. Every Saturday a thousand people gather and march in the streets demanding the end of something. All the quarantine measures have been lifted in these parts, but that has only emboldened them. As with the occupiers in the Dominion capital, this is not really about the mandates, if it ever really was. These people are demanding a kind of revolution, an overturning of the order of things, and a return to a world that never was. They want that imposed upon us all in the name of freedom. The police do nothing and the governments announce they are very concerned. And every Saturday our streets are overtaken again.

I am tired of it, so many of us are. Lately there have been people from the community gathering to block the protesters, attempting to take back our neighbourhood. It is hard to see how this ends well. Eventually it will subside, but like the Grippe Reborn it will continue percolating, overwhelmed by the roar of other things, the swell of our lives, never quite receding entirely.