CW: This post mentions death and Covid / April 2020, so if you do not want to dwell on those at the moment, that is totally understandable and I’ll see you another time.
As I study astrology, there are a lot of times I need to think back on certain periods of my life. I.e., if Mars was in retrograde, I’d look at the last time Mars was in retrograde, about two years before, for perspective.
The Photos app – where you can search Month + Year – has been excellent for that. In all those photos of random breakfasts, screenshots of silly things you see saw online (or rude texts from people you are in conflict with), nice sunsets, all the bad photos you took before the good one you edited and shared on social media, and friends laughing in apartments you no longer live in, a narrative begins to form about that phase in your life. The story of that Mars retrograde informs the overarching narrative of Mars retrograde. Astrology is, after all, storytelling. That’s what draws me to it, anyway.
Whatever form of meaning-making you engage in, there is no doubt that when looking back at photos in this way, random, mundane moments take on a great weight. They are a reminder that Time Is Passing.
The other night, instead of searching Month + Year as I normally do, the reverse happened. I remembered a makeshift memorial I saw when walking down the street in Lewisham, and could not remember what month or year I had taken a photo of it.
I imagine the t-shirt belonged to the boy who’d died in that intersection. The note, written by his mother, said he was 21 years old. She also wrote that he’d been hit by the 185 bus and no justice had been served. The note is addressed to her deceased son, to whom she confessed that while she’d been trying to believe he was at peace with God, Satan had intervened, and she was struggling with her faith. There was a Tesco near the site, and I think random people as well as people who knew him bought flowers from there to place at the memorial.
I do not know why I remembered this so suddenly – nothing prompted it. But I was overcome with the urge to find it among the thousands of photos on my phone. I did so by remembering something else that happened that day: me sending a jokey-but-clearly-irritated text to my then-boyfriend, and he responding in a similarly coded way. He’d been whining complaining about being stuck indoors during the first Covid lockdown, pelting me with links to tweets about other people whining complaining about the same thing, overly smitten with their contrived, well-packaged cleverness. You are too online, was the gist of my text. I had just walked past this memorial, and his boredom felt offensive, like a great privilege he was squandering. (I probably could have communicated that.) I looked up the exact wording of his response on WhatsApp, and saw it had happened exactly four years ago, in April 2020.
The timing was just an eerie coincidence, I think – why would this sort of thing work according to the man-made, 365-days-a-year calendar? The more likely culprit is that I am becoming more spiritual. It’s something I have always resisted, because I was raised with it – not just with Hindu ceremonies but lots of the popular self-help books of the time (and their many spin-offs), the audiobooks of which were a constant in car journeys long and short, much to the chagrin of my siblings and I, who begged my parents to switch to Z100 (unsuccessfully). The sleepy drone of Eckhart Tolle is forever burned into my skull. He won, I guess.
But the thing that always bothered me about self-help books is the certainty of the author’s convictions, more like salesmen than shamans. What makes spirituality interesting to me now is the doubt itself: having something to measure material reality against and seek out meaning – or stories – in the gaps. It was this Lewisham mother’s spiritual doubt that had buried itself in my memory, and came out of the woodwork to remind me that doubt is essential. Yes, even self-doubt. Because it is a step up from uncertainty, or to take hierarchy out of it, a way to navigate uncertainty – magic carpet, a flying broomstick, a spaceship, a jet ski immune to the laws of physics. Because you can’t have doubt without also having some tie to faith, or loving somebody so much that you struggle to believe they have gone for a reason.
I’m compelled to apologise for getting too deep! Anyway, I wanted to share more photos from April 2020 that I took on my phone, which capture quiet moments from that terrifying, ‘unprecedented’ time, which was so full of uncertainty. The thing that kept me (and many, many others who had the privilege to do so) sane were long walks where I inched further and further out of my neighbourhood. Britain’s mercurial weather was unusually consistent. The one predictable thing that happened were flowers blooming everywhere, which I now like to think of as divine.
See you in a fortnight,
Nikkitha