Timehops

I downloaded Timehop right around the baby's first birthday. Suddenly there was something I wanted to see every day, from one year ago, day by day the tiny wrinkly baby and the little potato and the smushy smile that's the same smile I know today but toothless. A year ago now he was in a really primo baby phase, giggling and cruising and learning somehow to drink from my camelbak bottle. 

It comes with all the other years, too, scraped from your social media and photo roll, the cats and vacations and pictures of breakfast. I started taking pictures on an iPhone right around the time I met my husband, it seems like. Once in a while history stretches a bit farther back past that horizon, though—a baseball game twelve years ago yesterday—and it's jarring but also a recognition, oh hello, past life.

One year ago this week seems to have been when I started wearing a mask to walk the dog. Or at least when I started taking selfies of myself doing so at least daily. They were handmade masks, sewn by my mother-in-law and sent to us before anyone was even wearing them, and my first thought on seeing myself in one of them a few days ago was, Wow, our masks have come so far. (My mother-in-law is a great sewer (seamstress?) and the masks were cute and colorful but never fit my face right.) Now I have fabric masks with elastic and nose-bridge wire, I have a KF94 that fits perfectly, I have a first dose of vaccine in my arm and five weeks until full vaccination.

But last April I had none of that, just masks I tied tight around my head to make them fit, and, at this point a year ago, week three of an ongoing low-grade panic attack. 

I don't remember much of last spring because I had to shut so much of myself off to function. And I dreaded the anniversary pandemic reminiscences because I didn't want to be brought back there, the Bad Night when the NBA shut down and my long-term panic attack kicked off. I hid from those as I hid from memories of the 2016 election. I even wrote about that, a year later in 2017, advising people to turn off Facebook Memories lest their feeds be bombarded with, oh, I don't know, triumphantly smiling photographs of themselves in nick-of-time arrived "I'm With Her" t-shirts snapped at like 7pm that evening? Just hypothetically. That would be bad.

But Timehop isn't triggering me now, even though I thought it would. It's reminding me. I see an instagram story from when I got my weighted blanket, and I'm grateful for how it allowed me to start sleeping past 5am. I see a picture of me and the baby under cherry blossoms and I remember reassuring myself that no one had smeared fomites on the blossoms that morning, alongside the wonder of his consternation at the texture of the petals he touched. I see a post I made about going for a walk, and I remember it felt like ages into the pandemic—and I realize it was only a couple of weeks. 

I'm not nostalgic for that time—it fucking sucked, this all fucking sucks—but each day's pictures bring a bit of tenderness, letting me re-live that dissociated time from a bit more safety, a bit more knowing of how things would turn out. It turned out so much worse, in so many ways, than I could have even imagined. But at least I know how it turned out.

I post the one-year-ago baby pictures to instagram sometimes, or turn my phone to my husband to show him that smushy face. But the masked selfies, which were at the time me trying to understand myself in this new world, are still just for me. Mundane and blurry, poorly lit, a day I can now remember, gently clicking into context.