I draw on my 2023-24 fieldwork of Covid 19 in a township in South Africa to understand whether memorized, relived, or reenacted version of events or experiences create credible anthropological knowledge. Capturing experiences/moments of the recent past and staying true to anthropological practice was one of my major personal conflicts when conducting fieldwork of a pandemic that was declared over. It proved not only a challenge to my own personal disciplinary conflict with the ethnographic non-encounters of the recent past but a huge ask for the residents in Diepsloot who had to recreate the pandemic moments. Recollections of the Covid 19 moments proved problematic compared to conducting fieldwork in the moment in which I capture things as and when these happen. What kind of raptures are created in trying to capture the experiences in a different moment than when these things were happening. Would the data captured create credible and dependable anthropological knowledge as compared to if I had gone to Diepsloot during Covid 19 period when there were all the lockdown restrictions, and security enforcers in the likes of the army, police, and specialized tactical units. What is lost or gained in capturing these experiences in retrospect? Do the ethnographies captured in retrospect have the same traction as those captured in the present (as and when it happens) {the texture, nature, frequency, intensity?}. Consequently, the question of methods of capturing distant experiences or the recent past becomes a central issue which I also seek to address.