115. Mercury Retrograde – Alex Gaertner
One of the things Mercury retrograde is notorious for is that certain people from your past appear out of blue.
Lately I’ve been thinking about people from my past—old friends, ex-lovers, former co-workers. One moment, they’re a part of your life. The next, they’re gone, only a memory.
There’s a reason for my preoccupation with the past. Mercury retrograde is here, an astrological phenomenon with an infamous reputation for wreaking havoc and causing mayhem. For those unfamiliar, Mercury retrograde is a three-week period that occurs three times a year, during which time Mercury (the planet of communication) appears to move backwards in the sky. Just like the moon affects the tides, Mercury affects the Earth, causing disruptions, delays, miscommunications. During Mercury retrograde, which began on October 14 and will end on November 3, we’re advised not to start anything new: no projects, no relationships, no jobs. This is a time to pause, to rest, to reflect. It’s also a time to think about our past, and how we’ve changed.
One of the things Mercury retrograde is notorious for is that certain people from your past appear out of blue. Just last week I saw a childhood friend on the street. Years ago, this person was my best friend, until it became clear to him that I was gay — then suddenly he wasn't. When I saw him, I started thinking about the boy I used to be: the anxious, closeted 12-year-old. And as I saw this old friend, I was surprised to realize I felt nothing. I felt free, I guess. The sight of him didn’t inspire anxiety because I understood I am no longer the person I used to be.
I use astrology as a tool to deepen my understanding of the self, so I can contextualize what I’m experiencing—thoughts, feelings, encounters—with what’s happening in the sky. Which is precisely why Mercury retrograde, although popularized as something that you should be afraid of, is also a time for growth.
– Alex Gaertner
Prompt:
Write about a time you encountered someone from your past after many years. How did it feel to be suddenly reacquainted with this person? What did it reveal to you—about who you were and who you are now?
Anonymous
Location: California
About: A reflection on meeting and re-meeting/remembering and forgetting.
Age: 49
Kate Collier
Location: London
About: Kate, from London, considers past loves and present selves; before and after cancer.
Age: 37
NOSTALGIA
“Nostalgia – it’s delicate but potent. In Greek, nostalgia literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.
This device isn’t a spaceship; it’s a time machine.
It goes backwards, and forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel; it’s called the Carousel.
It let’s us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved.” – Don Draper, MAD MEN Season 1, Episode 13 ‘The Wheel’.
Today, I re-watched the film ABOUT TIME – a tear-brimmed Rom-Com perfect for the Mercury retrograde prompt (warning: this journal contains spoilers). During the course of the movie, a time-travelling meet cute develops into into something else: a love story between Dad and son, which captures the bittersweet longing for a loved, lost parent. And a new determinedness post-trauma - to live each day eyes open to its joys.
This film took me back to a transatlantic flight when, mid-chemotherapy, I watched it for the first time. To a time when I was very ill, and didn’t think I’d get better (cancer; believed to be terminal; age 30-33; now 4.5 years in recovery). As that airliner - wings forced downwards, plane pushed upwards – hummed forwards in the miracle of flight, I cried noiselessly. For a time before and a time after that I thought would never come.
I was trapped in the side-wind of the sick; looking on at the blithe lives of the well, gliding unknowingly in parallel. All I wanted was my own old life - to get back to an albeit slightly elevated version of normal. To luxuriate in the non-medical day-to-day and to live, with the difficult, simple knowledge of how sweet that was. I didn’t know then that this urgent drive would turn into one of the cul-du-sacs of survivorship – perpetual dead-end attempts to get back to a person that was gone.
Now, as I think on this theme, there have been other strange circularities this week.
To pass the locked-down hours, as I’m sure we all sometimes do, I was Facebook ‘nostalgia surfing’ ghosts-of-boyfriends-past. Pulling petals from digital daisies - ‘he loved me; he loved me not’ – I clicked mindlessly through a biography of before (a disclaimer here, harmlessly. I am head-over-heels married to a heart-achingly good man, who always pulls me perpetually forwards in his capacity to hope).
First, I looked for Tim - searching for clues of his now-life. Then, he was perma-tanned charmer. A first-class student who swept me off my feet, taking me on my first very restaurant date and driving a BMW to lectures. Our relationship was short-lived. He swapped my unruly curls and battered tobacco tin for a blonde with clean fingernails. It suited him more. His middle names were Charles and Henry, and he seemed destined to sail through life gleaming and untouched.
Except he didn’t. Years later - when I was living with the then-love-of-my-young-life, a musician called Sam – a friend told me that Tim had cancer. Leukaemia or Lymphoma (these were days when I didn’t instantly, intimately, recognise all details of the ‘cancerverse’). Even though we dated for mere weeks - even though it didn’t end happily - I had the urgent drive to reach out to him. To tell him he was in my thoughts, and that I would love to see him again.
And so I texted him just that. He replied: it was great to hear from me, and he would very much like to see me.
The relationship with Sam, from a fairy-tale beginning at a Christmas-time Cambridge ball, had already hit the place of no return – the nagging gut-tug of suspecting someone no longer loves you. And for some reason - perhaps to stoke his insecurity, to make him feel my same wound - I told him. About Tim; his cancer; that we planned to meet.
“I just think it’s weird,” he said, typically black and white. “I’d never get in contact with an ex like that. Why would I want to see them? Why would they want to hear from me?” His words carved through me; cutting off a corner of my sense of self, the then long-since degraded person who existed separate to him. Was I the abnormality – for getting in touch, for sending love?
And so I didn’t reply to Tim. I still feel guilty about how shallow my tourism of his trauma was; quickly forgotten. And Sam and I broke up soon after. Then, as I would again so much more dramatically - as an emergency admission to A&E, through a shock diagnosis, six surgeries and 52 chemotherapies - I tumbled off a cliff of sadness and had to re-learn who I was.
But back to my Facebook scrolling. Tim, too, survived cancer. In his profile picture, he smiles – cutting a wedding cake with another, similar blonde. Perhaps back on the merry-go-round of the life he should’ve had – but maybe not. Likely permanently altered behind the eyes, and trying nevertheless to forge forwards.
No more to discover here, I moved on to another ex: Will. My hard-drinking, jazz-trumpeting holiday romance immediately before Tim and Sam. His picture is all Cornish curls and lunar eyes - an unusual, crystalline blue that hints at a secret soulfulness hiding, just out of reach; behind his good-natured womanising, catnip to damaged women.
He looked similar, handsome – but 305 comments? That seemed strange. I clicked through.
I paused in shock at his words. “Stage 4 cancer and still as hairy as ever. No tears. I plan on getting better. If not, I’ve done more than many did in 100 years. No regrets.”
Now, again, I face the same dilemma that I did with Tim those years before. Should I reach out to him? Let him know that I am holding him in my heart; this time with the added ammunition that I too had been there - Stage 4 - and was still here? Would he want to hear from me – a tiny speck of his past, infatuated for a moment – if I could offer some support or understanding?
Instead, I sit here frame-frozen and think about him; of my ABOUT TIME flight. The twinge then - in my heart - tugging me back a time now permanently out of reach.
I turn it all over simultaneously. Tim, Will, Sam. The years of survival I spent stuck; trying to get back to a previous self. How I now know this isn’t possible.
Not because I have been ill – because cancer is a fissure too deep to cross – but because the self is continuous and ever moving.
Raindrop, river, ocean, cloud.
I think how we loop around, spooling backwards and forwards simultaneously, never standing still.
If Will were here in front of me instead of static on a screen, I would tell him that I am and am not the girl who stood there then, with so much passed. I’m a walking paradox – at once a subject and its opposite. Life, death, sick and well - a body that tried to kill me and kept me alive. And that I hope he will stand here too, manning these contortions.
I’m still trying – to return to the Don Draper quote I begun this journal with– “to travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved.”
The place? My elemental self, which cancer – and each person I have loved - did and didn’t change, in ways I’ll never fully know.
*NB. Names have been changed for privacy reasons.