Diary of a Quarantined Girl

March, 2056

"It's a diary, sir."

"Lydia, you're the editor of a world-class magazine. You know better than to call up your boss about a diary you found. Get to work."

"Sir, it's the diary of a girl written during The Quarantine of 2020."

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Lydia could hear her boss breathing, slowly.

"Have you read the diary? I need details."

Lydia holding the phone to her ear with a shoulder, thumbed through the pages. "The child who kept this diary can't have been over ten. She refers to herself as Chim, and her diary is referred to by her as 'Mochi'. Chim seems to have been a talented artist."

"Artist? It's a sketchbook?"

"No, there are entries, but Avery seems to have taken some creative liberties with it. She's filled them in loosely with watercolour, too. Empty streets, sanitized sinks, some assorted scenery. Her accounts are unusually vivid and descriptive." Lydia's eyes fell on an entry for April 5, 2020, and she bit back a smile. 'I have to lern my clarienet lessons on the cumputer, Mochi!!' She spoke into the receiver. "Spelling wasn't her strongest suit, though."

She heard her boss sigh. "Why are you telling me this? What do you want to do, an expository?"

Lydia had made up her mind. She was going to convince her boss, too. "As the coronavirus continued to spread and confine people largely to their homes, this child chose to fill page after page of her experience of living through a pandemic. This is valuable information, you know. She told her stories in words and pictures-" Lydia paused to shuffle through some pages, "-pantry inventories, window views, questions about the future, concerns about the present. This is an insight into what it was like 22 years ago. Where else are you going to get this?"

Her boss snorted, but even she could tell he was losing his conviction. "Lydia. Assistant Editor of History Weekly. You have to give me something people are going to want to read. Do you pick up magazines with the intention of reading diary entries of ten year olds?"

She took a deep breath. "Taken together, the pages tell the story of an anxious, claustrophobic world on pause. Chim writes, 'you can say whatever you want in your diary, and no one will judge you', and she's absolutely right. Don't you see? History isn't written by the bigwigs. It's written by people, ordinary people like you and me. That's what makes it so special, that's why people will read it."

Her boss grunted.

"Also," she went on, not to be defeated, "When historians look to write the story of life during the pandemic, they're only ever going to care about first-person accounts. In a subject rife with speculation, imagine the value we can provide to them with concrete evidence."

There was a pregnant pause. "Look," sighed her boss, "Lydia-"

"Sir. This is our magazine. We can fill it with snapshots of ordinary lives, long gone. A handwritten recipe. A letter written by a soldier at the front. A drawing of a kitchen sink. One of the most famous works of academic history — “A Midwife’s Tale,” by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich — came from the diary kept by a woman living in Maine from 1785 to 1812. It won a Pulitzer Prize."

"A Pulitzer, you say?"

"Now, Sir, what this child was too young to realize is that she was living through what sociologists refer to as “emergent moment.” It's a time when new rules begin to develop, but they are not yet clear. Sociologically, this is incredible.”

"Well, I suppose if it's all that big of a deal, we can publish a few pages and come up with a full edition later in the future," Boss agreed, still sounding a little unsure.

This is going to be massive," Lydia found herself promising him. "Look, Boss, accounts being recorded on paper is crucial to their longevity. People think the internet is going to be permanent, but we’re already starting to lose things that were committed to bits and bytes. It's happening, and we can do nothing but hope to get our hands on records that make it indelible."

"Go ahead. Bring it to HQ, I'll be waiting." He hung up.

Lydia smiled. This is us, she thought, communicating across centuries.