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 Thousand Four Hundred Sixty One

I have never been one for anniversaries or birthdays, getting the measure of our days through accounting. As though by tallying the moments of our lives in their thousands into a ledger they might somehow be given a greater meaning. It is their very lack of meaning that gives them power.  

During the era of the Grippe Reborn such accounting seemed the only meaning we had. For two years we lived in suspended animation, uncertain of anything. I counted the days and marked the anniversaries. The Ides of March took on a new significance as the time when the Dread Lord Grippe Reborn made himself known in these parts. The whole world seemed to be collapsing in a matter of days. This year as the calendar turned to March I did not think of the Dread Lord’s return. Only as I heard others speak of it did I recall it was now four years since his return. 

Four years. It seems impossible that it has been that long since those first unsettling days of our strange, shared nether existence. And yet it also seems a lifetime ago. We were other people then and we are something else now. Time was broken and we were too and now the pieces have all been put back together. Yet we are changed, and who wants to go back and be reminded of that breaking and what was lost.  

I had another encounter with the Dread Lord after Christmas this year and experienced first hand how much reduced in power he is. A trifling cold that lasted less than a week, and which I gave no thought to after it was over. My love did not even get sick. The only consequence was that we had to cancel our New Year’s plans.  

A mark was made upon us, much as we might prefer not to think about it. We shall not get those two years back and we have already gone a long way toward forgetting them, putting them outside ourselves. A wound that has healed over leaving a scar whose path we can just trace. I wonder what aches we will feel from it in the coming storms.