“The Pandemic Was A Portal”: By Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan (Keywords: Covid; Letters; Possible Futures; Collectivity; Inequalities)

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Five years after the start of the Covid pandemic, two phrases stand out as defining—and ironic—messages of the era: “We are all in this together” and “We have the tools.” Joe Biden said these lines more than once during his presidency, echoing a chorus of journalists, policymakers, business owners, and public health officials. But their meanings shifted dramatically over time.

In the earliest months of the pandemic, “We are all in this together” expressed genuine fellow feeling and common cause. Then it became aspirational. Then delusional. And finally, coercive.

“We have the tools,” a phrase that gained prominence in 2021, marked a turning point in how the US government approached the crisis. With (unequally available) vaccines and treatments on the market, Covid was increasingly framed as an individual problem rather than a collective one. This rationale justified the rollback of masking, testing, and quarantine measures, even as new variants—Beta, Delta, Omicron—emerged. While these changes were framed as steps toward normalcy, they also coincided with significant profits for pharmaceutical companies and widening disparities in protection. Far from uniting us, the dominant rhetoric continues to obscure a brutal reality: we are not all in this together, and we do not all have the tools.

But it wasn’t always this way. It didn’t have to be this way. At first, there was, in fact, a we—and it wasn’t gaslighting to say so. As David Wallace-Wells recalls of early 2020, “the solidarity was breathtaking.” We “overwhelmingly [wanted] to take care of one another,” writer-activist Vicky Osterweil remembers—starting mutual aid projects, checking on neighbors, imagining new ways to live together. People across every identitarian axis recognized the crisis as a chance, as Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson put it, to make a “breach with the status quo.”

Nothing was normal, and so everything was possible.

In the beginning, borders, nationalities, and social divisions seemed secondary to the shared fact of our human vulnerability. Whether you were an Italian shopkeeper, an American nurse, or Tom Hanks stuck in Australia, no one had immunity, and we all knew it. Of course, privilege fundamentally shaped the experience. Tom could quarantine at home, while essential workers kept working. But for a brief window, it seemed they might actually be treated as essential, not expendable, and that those most at risk might finally be valued. There were no vaccines yet, no hoarded treatments, no $1,400 Paxlovid prescriptions. Those inequalities would come later.

In the beginning, borders, nationalities, and social divisions seemed secondary to the shared fact of our human vulnerability.

I remember that time vividly—the feeling of possibility, the hope for radical change—because I wrote it down. In March 2020, my dear friend, the philosopher Chi Rainer Bornfree, invited me into a weekly exchange of letters. For over four years, we documented the pandemic, our responses, and the shifting public discourse. Those letters, recrafted, have now been published as a memoir with Aleph Book Company: The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once.

Our book was inspired by a prescient April 2020 essay by writer Arundhati Roy, called “The Pandemic is a Portal.” In it, Roy offers a challenge:

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Chi and I were galvanized by this vision. Like Roy, we felt that “nothing could be worse than a return to normality.” Many voiced similar sentiments. “At the very least, we should commit to this: there will be no return to normal,” cultural theorist Grant Farred urged. “I think the longer we are home, the more hope there is the world will change in giant ways,” writer Pam Houston predicted.

With hope for transformation in mind, Chi and I wrote 100 letter-essays between March 2020 and May 2024, signing them “C” and “R.” Our letters became a kind of portal themselves—a space to imagine new lives, jobs, cities, literary forms, relationships, and ways of thinking about the self and society, shaped through collaboration.

We weren’t alone in turning to letter-writing during the pandemic. In 2020, writers around the world exchanged lockdown missives, kept parallel diaries, contributed to collective journals, and published “together apart”, to borrow the title of an Orion magazine feature. They—we—wrote in search of “communion”, as The Black | Indigenous 100s Collective put it in their pandemic book, Say, Listen: Writing as Care. Writers collaborated in Google Docs and through text threads, on platforms like Ao3 and Wattpad, documenting the present as it unraveled in real time. In Maynard’s words, we wanted to “think together about what it means [to] build livable lives.” From this fevered interlocution emerged essays, edited volumes, online archives—not to mention podcasts, films, and art installations.

Some of these epistolary experiments became books. Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor distilled over 500,000 words of correspondence into A Friendship in Twilight: Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life. Maynard and Simpson kept up their “record of relationality” until the 2020 U.S. election, later publishing it as Rehearsals for Living. Houston and Amy Irvine collected their letters from March to May 2020 in Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place, writing, “Maybe post-Covid we will be more conscious. After all, what single thing could be better designed than this virus to show us what me-ism gone mad in America has wrought?”

Looking back, it makes perfect sense that so many people turned to letter-writing—and that, as Houston notes, letters became “one of the gifts to come out of this pandemic.” Covid made nearby people feel far away and distant people feel close. It created new, lived experiences of globality and transnational connection. After years of theoretical discourse on these topics, the virus forced us to confront the visceral realities of our simultaneously bordered and borderless world. “Cosmopolitan with a vengeance,” as Rustom Bharucha put it in The Second Wave. Covid laid bare our shared human condition and made a mockery of the illusions of independence and autonomy.

Covid laid bare our shared human condition and made a mockery of the illusions of independence and autonomy. However brief, the rupture of Covid generated a widespread commitment to interdependence and dialogue.

However brief, the rupture of Covid generated a widespread commitment to interdependence and dialogue. We wanted to talk to each other. Those of us not immediately fighting for our lives wanted to ask what those lives meant—together. This is what C called, in a letter dated June 8, 2021, the gift of having been given “new unanswerable questions to live.” Questions like: What makes life livable—and for whom? What forms of writing are adequate for this time? Whose stories must be told? How do we change the world? “What world is this?” philosopher Judith Butler asked in their book by that name.

Early pandemic books could pose such questions because their authors believed in the promise of Roy’s portal. They believed, as Robin D. G. Kelley wrote in an Afterword to Rehearsals for Living, that “the end of the world promises nothing except the chance to make the world anew.” The first months of Covid created “a collective feeling,” as Kate Zambreno observed in The Light Room. Many commentators were confident that the global vaccination campaign would succeed. They imagined, in Butler’s words, a world where people would “accept mask-wearing as an obligation of public life.” Americans on the left excitedly anticipated universal healthcare, expanded public transportation, and action on the climate crisis. In Grounded, public humanities scholar Christopher Schaberg even predicted that air travel would be forever changed and improved.

Across book after book written in the first year of the pandemic, the same idea surfaces: this moment was charged with the possibility of a better future.

Across book after book written in the first year of the pandemic, the same idea surfaces: this moment was charged with the possibility of a better future. “Ours is a time tailor-made for utopian thinking,” Farred observed in Only a Black Athlete Can Save Us Now. In Houston’s words, “[E]verything is possible beyond our wildest dreams.”

On June 4, 2020, I wrote a letter to C reflecting on how our survival might depend upon a reimagining of everything, from how we spend our minutes to the genres in which we write, asking, “If not now, when?”

***

To be clear, many of the writers I’m describing as hopeful about the pandemic’s transformative potential also understood that the portal might shut. We knew that possibility was not the same as inevitability. We knew that state declarations of “togetherness” were often a rhetorical cover for inaction. As Fang Fang warned in Wuhan Diary, “When you hear people say, ‘We will sacrifice everything at any cost,’ don’t misunderstand ‘we’ as meaning ‘us’—you are actually the ‘cost.’”

“No matter how many times the state says, ‘We are in this together,’” Simpson wrote, “we know we most certainly are not.”

Disability activists, Indigenous organizers, and progressive writers were right to situate Covid within a long history of state-sanctioned violence and organized abandonment. It is now undeniable that the pandemic deepened existing inequalities in the United States and around the world. The hardest-hit communities were those already most vulnerable: migrants, people of color, the sick and disabled, the incarcerated, children, and the elderly—all those whom global capitalism deems, in Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant’s term, “surplus.” Covid’s impact was uneven on every level—social, immunological, racial, geographic—and as the months went on, the divide between haves and have-nots only grew.

Covid’s impact was uneven on every level—social, immunological, racial, geographic—and as the months went on, the divide between haves and have-nots only grew.

In retrospect, however, I think some of the most perceptive critics of structural inequity may have underestimated how the pandemic was also shattering the illusions of privilege. For instance, Simpson dismissed “white” and “middle-class” people as “isolat[ing] themselves in their houses with Netflix, grocery delivery, working their secure jobs from home with complete confidence that their governments have their best interests in mind.”

But many of those same people saw the cracks in the façade of collectivity—and were radicalized by them. As I wrote to C on July 4, 2020, quoting a feminist on Twitter, many of us had been forced to “learn our class position for the first time.” Writers like Farred, Houston, Irvine, Miles, Smith, Taylor, Zambreno—and, for that matter, Chi and I—never believed the monied powers had our best interests in mind. As Houston wrote to Irvine, “One thing the pandemic has made crystal clear is exactly how much we are on our own.”

In this light, I want to suggest that what at first sounded naïve—relatively privileged people declaring “we are all in this together”—may actually have meant something else: We are all in this together insofar as we now finally see that we are all on our own. In other words, the realization among the protected classes in the Global North that we had never truly been “in this together” created an opening—a moment in which we might, at last, have recognized ourselves as part of the collective.

The pandemic marked a period of profound awakening for those of us who had previously been shielded from the worst of capitalist exploitation. In Intimations, Zadie Smith called it “the global humbling.” “Millions of people,” she predicted, “won’t easily forget what they have seen.”

Smith was right. And ironically, that explains the great gaslighting that followed the solidarity of those first pandemic months, hastening what Adler-Bolton, Vierkant, and Philip Rocco have called “the sociological production of the end of the pandemic.” 

Slowly, and then all at once, the early pandemic’s we was co-opted, repurposed as a tool of coercion.

Slowly, and then all at once, the early pandemic’s we was co-opted, repurposed as a tool of coercion. By the time Biden assumed office, we had lost ground on almost every front, from mask wearing to worker protections. By the end of his term, Biden had rolled back pandemic-era social welfare programs, enforced the Medicaid unwinding, and normalized the “you do you” version of pandemic response, all while presiding over hundreds of thousands of Covid deaths, and capitulating to dangerous, revisionist narratives about school closures and lockdowns and unscientific speculation about the impact of Covid precautions on our immune systems.

“The portal’s closed,” C wrote to R soberly on November 12, 2022, “Now there is just more living and dancing with Covid…”

***

Writers describing the pandemic as if it ended in 2020 or 2021 could not foresee the endurance of global vaccine apartheid, the rise of variants, the vast and ongoing crisis of Long Covid, the erasure of Covid data, or the collective acquiescence to mass death and disability. They did not imagine that people would simply give up—unmask, look away, move on. Nor could they have predicted that in 2025, we would be dealing with the terrible upheavals and violence of the second Trump administration. They didn’t see any of this—because they stopped writing.

“I’ve never seen, in my own lifetime, such strong attunement, across different publics, many for the first time, to the need to collectively craft responses to support and protect one another, and those long abandoned by the state,” Maynard wrote in 2020.

That moment of attunement—that overdue recognition of what marginalized communities had long known—was the portal. Not a portal to Roy’s new world, maybe, but a portal through which the privileged could finally see what had always been apparent to everyone else: we need each other. We have to fight together. We won’t make it alone.

No one wanted to publish Chi’s and my letters in 2021, 2022, or 2023, so we kept writing. We wrote, as our book’s three section titles put it, from “the cave” into “the portal” into “the woods.” Letter by letter, Chi and I were drawn into deepening conflict—with the world, with each other, and with ourselves. In hindsight, those rejections were a gift. They gave us time to document what happened after the portal closed: the fragmentation and isolation that followed the lifting of lockdowns and mandates, the unraveling of pandemic-era solidarity, the mass disillusionment and anomie that the historian Nate Holdren has termed our “broken sociality.” As I wrote to C on March 4, 2023, “Everything in the world right now is conspiring to break our existing bonds.”

Today, in April 2025, the pandemic story is no longer one of possibility. Three people in Texas and New Mexico have already died in an ongoing measles outbreak. Bird flu is on the rise. Across the United States, state legislatures are debating bans on masks. Covid minimizers now lead the FDA and NIH, and vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is head of the Department of Health and Human Services. Daily, lifesaving government programs are being shut down, as vaccination rates plummet and we go backward on climate change, education, healthcare, and reproductive rights. That’s to say nothing of the escalating war on higher education, immigrants, free speech, and, most recently, global trade.

As Vierkant put it in the Death Panel podcast’s year-end account of “Covid Year Five”:

To be quite frank, some of our worst fears have come to pass. Rather than learning anything about our collective precarity and the need to take care of one another, the pandemic has instead been used to reinforce a narrower and narrower construction of risk and vulnerability. We are left with a pre-pandemic fantasy of health: a world in which ‘normal people’ are imagined as the rightful protagonists of society, while the so-called vulnerable—those who are sick, disabled, or otherwise inconvenient—are positioned as an oppositional force, as though their needs threaten the well-being of everyone else.

How did we get here, to the Trump-Musk alliance, a symptom of our systemic Long Covid if there ever was one? Who decided the pandemic was over? Is the portal closed once and for all?

***

For five years, the history of the pandemic has been rewritten in real time—erased, revised, forgotten.

Chi and I wrote The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once so that there would be a record of what happened and of what might have been. We wrote to inhabit the pandemic, not to escape it. We wrote to rise to the occasion of Covid, not to put it behind us. We wrote to unlearn our rehearsed narratives and to make our lives anew. Over time, our collaboration became more urgent. As the world moved on from Covid, we doubled down on recording the intimate and world-historical transformations of the present before they faded into the past.

Because of our letters, Chi and I remember the future that could have been—before it wasn’t. We remember the urgency of connection, before the retreat into our atomized spheres. We remember each time the pundits declared the pandemic over. We remember when the whole room was masking—then a dozen, then a couple, then just one. We remember there was a “we.”

In 2020, there was a widely shared dream of collectivity. Forgetting the pandemic has meant forgetting that dream.

In 2020, there was a widely shared dream of collectivity. Forgetting the pandemic has meant forgetting that dream. For a time, we really wanted to survive together. We glimpsed what it could mean to share the tools, to build something new. And then we stepped through the wrong portal, away from each other, away from what could have been.

What if, in moving on from Covid, we left behind the better future we could have had? What do we need to remember—to make that impossible world possible again?   

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is an assistant professor of English at Rice University in Houston, Texas. The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once, written with Chi Rainer Bornfree, is available now from Aleph Book Company. Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone will be published in June 2025 by Columbia University Press, and What is We?, for Agenda Publishing’s “The New Basics” series, is forthcoming in November 2025. Website: www.raginitharoorsrinivasan.com

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