Return to normal? Remembered futures and the post-pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic was and is many pandemics, experienced unevenly by people of different races, classes, bodies, in different locations, nations and circumstances. Moreover, the pandemic evolved across time and through distinct phases. In the USA, for instance, 2 weeks to stop the spread morphed into a summer marked by George Floyd's death and the ensuing activism; the winter's joy over vaccination availability became concern over its slow, uneven rollout. Waves of changing pop culture phenomena-Netflix shows like <i>Tiger King</i> or <i>Bridgerton</i>, hashtags like #hotvaxsummer-combined with the lived realities of the day-to-day, marked by illness, death, survival, fear, boredom, violence and grief. It is easy to forget the nuances of that day-to-day reality. Pandemics themselves are out of step with time, as a pandemic's past and present are a collapsed future time, as symptoms and diagnoses of infection remain out of sync with actual infection. And now, in this quasi-post-pandemic moment, the rhetoric of 'return to normal' and discourse about 'learning loss' suggest that society should operate uninterrupted-that it is possible to devise a future without the pandemic past. This article introduces the concept of remembered futures, or memories of futures imagined in the past. The pandemic's lived experience was an experience of many presents and possible futures, and so post-pandemic presents must also make room for those past futures imagined in past presents. To make this argument, I look at three works composed and published during Spring and Summer of 2020: Sabrina Orah Mark's <i>Paris Review</i> web column, 'Happily'; Charles Yu's short story 'Systems'; and Nguyên Khôi Nguyễn's graphic novel, 'Bittersweet: A Pandemic Sketchbook'. I argue that post-pandemic futures do not just require a memory of the past, but a memory of the futures of the past, to find their way towards the new possibilities for the future present.