It’s hard to believe that the terrible reign of COVID-19 started 6 years ago. The pandemic sometimes feels more like a world we went to than a time we lived through, and we don’t much like being reminded of that place or care to revisit it. Usually when the pandemic comes up in casual conversation, it’s all sighs and sentence fragments. We shake our heads and swiftly shift gears. It’s a lovely little trick of our human nature that we have trouble conjuring experiences of pain. But “the past is never dead. It isn’t even past,” William Faulkner once wrote. And whether we wish to speak any more of the pandemic or not, it continues, of course, to speak through us.
