This month, consider the possibility that your memories may have been doctored.

The actor Danny Glover once said that, in times of disaster, poverty rises like a bruise to the skin. Everything that is going on today was happening in January as well.

The NYC death rate is more than twice what it usually is. Unemployment numbers are the worst they’ve been since the Great Depression. They’ve reopened Rikers Island, which has immediately developed the worst infection rate in the world, and are even transporting people from other centers to Rikers. 

COVID-19 doesn’t bring new crises. It exasperates what is already happening. NYC has a bad case of the coronavirus because it is a police state. It is a place where we pretend to solve problems by expanding our sacrifice zones.

As Audre Lorde said, revolution is not an event. It is a constant remembering and a daily commitment to healing.

Venus is planning to stay in Gemini for four months this year and, in May, Mercury overtakes the Sun and becomes an evening star. At this point in the cycle, Mercury is less preoccupied with anxious questions about the future that are never going to be answered and more with the question of memory. Retrograde season is officially here with both benefics and Saturn going backwards and slow around mid month. The full moon this month is in Scorpio, where the Moon finds its fall.

If COVID-19 is going to be a portal, then nothing is going to return to normal again. The only question is: what are your priorities now that the new normal has arrived?

May is about memories. In the world of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, futurism is the only aesthetic. What they don’t understand is that the future is only real if you can believe in it—the future is a god that only survives if people believe in its existence. Mercury is visible at twilight now—in Neil Gaiman’s book, American Gods, the god of twilight is the best prophet. She tells people the lies they want to believe.

What do you want to believe? Try contrasting that with what you remember.

In the BTS fanfiction Murmurations by fringecity, the characters are detectives who must investigate a cold murder case. The more they investigate the case, however, the more they begin to realize that their own memories are unreliable. They realize that it is likely that they were the ones who commited the murder or that the murder didn’t happen at all in the first place. The bigger questions that arises from the realization that they cannot trust their own memories are: who would have the means and the motive to stage an investigation where the detectives are the ones who commited the murder? If someone within the institution of the police were capable of staging this kind of situation, then what does it say about the world that they live in?

This month, consider the possibility that your memories may have been doctored. Ask yourself to find evidence of the real within them. Consider the possibility that there may have been someone lying to you about who you are and what kind of world you live in. Investigate your nostalgia and futurism as if it were a cold murder case. 

After all, poverty only rises like a bruise to the skin when it has been suppressed like a case of bad blood. America is built on a dream of getting away with murder—that’s why it’s populated by con artists, skinwalkers, and forests that swallow identities.

Questions to consider in May:

What are the lies that you’ve told yourself about the future?
What are the lies that you’ve told yourself about the past?
Where are the synchronicities in these two stories that point to evidence of the real?

Taurus

What are the lies that hide inside of your self-justifications? What are the things that you tell yourself you have to do and how might you be lying to yourself about these things? About what might you be wearing yourself thin just so that you might be right about the reasons that force you to suffer? May is about minimizing so that you emerge from this month stripped of everything that makes you assume.

No one’s forcing your hand. When you act from a position of powerlessness, then you choose to accept that power will always reign over you. If you want to live in a real way, then you have to argue for it against yourself. The thing about this crisis is that no one is watching you anymore. You live on your own terms now. Every decision that you make is a mark on your own conscience.

Gemini

There’s no such thing as the future. The future is a made up story that we tell ourselves so that we understand time in a certain way. Your job in May is to play the role of the time scientist. If you were to create another dimension, where would you put it?

If you stop believing in the future, then what do you start believing in? Do you start believing in the things that we used to represent the past with? Primordial connections between insects and plants? Conversations between different types of soil? Your job, Gemini storyteller/time-scientist, is to choose the type of stories we bring into the new world.

Cancer

Shame makes things that are very obvious to other people opaque to us. Shame makes some things about you obvious to the people who see you incomprehensible to you. This happens because shame is an affect of pride. You might feel shame around the same things that you feel pride in. You might feel shame in your national identity. You might feel shame around what it means to be from the United States of America.

Your ruling planet goes a little hungry this month and into the sign of its humiliation. This is okay. It means that it’s a time of understanding your shame. The Moon wants you to heal. It doesn’t want you to hoard your feelings. Don’t be scared of the Scorpio full moon. It just wants you to lessen the knapsack where you put your burdens so that you can move a little lighter.

Leo

The utopia that was sold to you is actually your own worst nightmare. The utopia of the futurists, of the tech bros with the silicon smile, is the same dystopia that defines people with your face and history as fully expendable. If you’re feeling disappointed, take a quiet moment to hear your ancestors nodding. They don’t share your disappointment. They have been trying to tell you that it’s unwise to replace your dreams with movies and television.

Turn off all of your monitors at a certain point in the night. Your dreamspace should be uncontaminated from mass produced narratives. Your dreamspace should wander and not sit immobile. In your dreamspace, don’t look for utopia. Look for history.

Virgo

Maybe your career doesn’t exist anymore but you know what does? Your life work and your life purpose. You exist, despite all those efforts that were taken to kill the people who birthed you. Are you really going to let a little thing like a capitalist economic recession take you down? You were put here to build new worlds.

It takes so little farming to grow enough food to feed everyone that you know, especially if everyone puts in a few hours everyday. Isn’t that miraculous? That we don’t actually need to buy any food to live? That the reason that we do buy food to survive isn’t because there isn’t enough food or land for the people who live on this planet to thrive but because our distribution systems are machines that starve us? Doesn’t that make you want to go and tinker with the world a little?

Libra

BTW, the institutions that the younger you craved acceptance and validation from are all dead. All these schools and museums and politicians are begging us to believe in them for just a little while longer. The only weapon that they have against us is fame—these places and people who are household names. Power is recognition.

Recognition is familiarity. New worlds are created through ritual mixed in with a little propaganda. Gather all of your ingredients for world building. Will you recognize the new world when it comes or will it be full of symbols that are incomprehensible because they haven’t existed before? In May, do this one simple task: recognize the cultures that do not strive to conceal history.

Scorpio

You don’t need to be physically present to be with people. You can be with people by sharing their moments and by sharing their histories. You can be with people by remembering time with them and by remembering them in time. Some people never leave you because your existence is evidence that they once lived.

Tell stories about people in May. Don’t tell moralistic stories because those never make sense but tell specific stories with the purpose of remembering the jokes and anecdotes that would otherwise fade as time passes. Record the important moments. Tell stories because doing so is an action of deciding that flimsy moments are important.

Sagittarius

There’s no such thing as faraway anymore. Not just because of travel bans but because this globalized world is really just a state of capital reproduced over and over. Remember that coronavirus spread the way it did because of globalization and that it reveals a very specific vulnerability in our current economy—capitalism doesn’t shield us from poverty or disease. It reproduces it. No one can escape crisis by leaving.

If you don’t believe in the faraway anymore, then what else is there? There’s the near and there’s the local. There’s the commitments that you have made to people and to places. There’s places that you cultivate and places that cultivate you. There’s the present and there’s your reality. There’s plenty.

Capricorn

Your body is your strength not because it’s perfect or ideal but because it’s a storage container for all of your memories and histories. There’s instincts built into you from the fears of your grandmothers and from the joys of your parents when they were children.

In May, prove to your body that you are both capable and willing to take good care of it. In May, your body is your child and your creation. If you feel like your head is hot, go to bed early. If you’re lightheaded, eat a good meal. Don’t google anything relating to your body, especially if you’re like the rest of us and develop psychosomatic symptoms during anxious nights, and just listen to what it wants you to know. Hearing your body is an act of remembering. 

Aquarius

The great thing about you, Aquarius, is that you don’t believe in time. You have the important gift of knowing that it is possible to change the past as long as you tell the right stories. This is an important skill as America tries to reckon with a history that it covered up like a henchman in the night. You’re able to find pleasure in crisis not because it doesn’t affect you but because you know how to twist things.

In May, start twisting. Twist every policy that tries to protect the citizens from the underclass and twist every assumption that protections and buffers provide safety. This is a time of America reckoning with its ghosts. You’re here as a haunter. You’re up to no good. You just want people to remember.

Pisces

If you think that your ancestors want you to feel guilty for your own existence, then you’re seeing them through the lenses of others. All your life, you’ve heard more lies than you’ve heard truths about what kind of people your ancestors were/are. This is the month to unpack that a little.

Steal your ancestors back from your own oppressors. Start by leaving your guilt and shame complexes behind for other people, since they don’t belong to you anyway. Argue back to the ghosts because they like to be entertained too. As you talk to them, watch them take different shapes. Not all of them are wearing your face.

Aries

Logic is a funny thing. It makes sense if you want it to make sense, if you believe 100% in all of the requirements that make it make sense. It takes a fair amount of bullshit to make a single rational statement. It takes a lot of assuming and posturing. The people who have been historically good at assuming and posturing at the same time tend to be white, tend to be men, and tend to be capitalists.

Investigate the logic systems of magical universes. There’s something that the world of fiction wants to teach you. I want you to go through May as if you were a con artist. I want you to sell your own version of reality to yourself. You can change your outfit if that helps you do it but it’s really not necessary. The best costume is really just the willingness to believe your own stories until they become true.