I look forward to Mercury retrogrades. I really do.

This Mercury retrograde, so far, I: bought pre-chopped onions that were soured and put them in my pan before I realized and prompted had to go through and pick out all of the rotten onion pieces, tried to take multiple buses that were rerouted on different streets that I could not find in a city I don’t live in, got fucked by taking the 4 to Fulton where no trains headed to where I live in Brooklyn, tried to go to the bank with a check in my pocket but realized that I had dropped the check somewhere on the street and tried to look for it by retracing my steps until I gave up on my own block and emailed the accounts guy but he was out of office for that afternoon, and tried to update by website by adding a search bar and accidentally deleting my entire site.

But, this is just a Mercury retrograde in a solar year. The last time I was in a Mercury year, the retrogrades made me lose a bit of faith in the world. They were the types of retrogrades that followed you out of the retrograde cycle, the type that made you rant and rave on the phone with a good friend because of how wretched you felt.

This Mercury retrograde I also: found my way around a city I didn’t live in and made it to all my appointments despite the buses being weird, found my way home on a bus transfer through some simple rerouting and discovered later that the reason the trains were fucked was not because it was a weekend but because someone had tragically been shot, recovered my website and learned how to do new things on git, and met the kindest neighbor who found my check and tracked me down by address to bring it back to me and rang the doorbell until my roommate told me there was someone looking for me and told me not to worry about it and that she lost things all the time.

There is Mercury’s retrograde and there is also Mercury’s grace. My stew turned out fine, by the way.

Mercury communicates with us in topsy turvy ways. It’s a very good communicator. It gives us all kinds of signs.

I remember there was a Mercury retrograde during which I had just been hired by a non-profit to do freelance teaching work. Immediately after onboarding, the organization had to do a racial remediation and teaching. I went even though I wasn’t really invited because I wasn’t really an employee to check things out. God, was that Mercury’s way of warning me not to work there, to stay away from that place.

Later, when things went “back to normal,” was when things were the worst at that job. Not when the remediation took place. That was when we were meant to stop being productive so that we could rethink things in just a day.

There’s not enough Mercury retrograde. I mean, it happens around three times a year. Mercury spends a lot of time in its retrograde shadow, in actual retrograde, and coming out of the shadow. There’s a lot of time during which we are not meant to move forward. There’s a lot of time during which we are supposed to be moving backwards.

If we had more Mercury retrograde, maybe we wouldn’t be forced to get up at the same time every morning to do things that we didn’t choose to do. Maybe we would account for errors, breakdowns, and for ruptures. If we had more Mercury retrograde, maybe neurodivergence wouldn’t be a thing because neurotypicality wouldn’t be a thing.

Maybe if we had more Mercury retrograde, we would finally have time to take a nap instead of just trying to play catch up with missed emails and texts all the time.

Mercury isn’t just the planet of the voice with all of its power of evocation. Mercury is also the planet of labor and labor is a magical, tricky thing just like Mercury. It’s the most important thing that we devalue.

Mercury retrograde is all of the conversations that we don’t have. It’s not the memos that we didn’t read. That’s not even half of it. Mercury retrograde is the corporate racial remediation that is needed because the corporation, with all of the histories of colonialism attached, exists. It’s the animals that we never created relationships to that already went extinct before we were even born. It’s that horrible urge to go backwards in time because our grief thinks that it’s so fucking stupid that time can only move forward in a straight line like the colonialists say it does even when our bodies know that it does not.

You can now why we need more Mercury retrograde.

The future is relentless not because it is uncertain but because it is always coming. We are sick with grief and, yet, we must get out of bed in the morning. We wish that we could have just a bit more of the hours we like best because we didn’t have time to be angry today even though we promised ourselves that we allow ourselves to be and, yet, the clock strikes eight when it is time and our alarms go off.

Someone, another astrologer named Orion Starworks, told me about the violence of phrase “know your place” today. We marveled at the simple kinkiness to it. Place is a little like time. There is a coercion involved and, anytime coercion shows up, you know that there’s a bit of you that wants, desperately, to be bad.

So, it’s Mercury retrograde. We’re bad at time these days or, rather, maybe good time makes us bad. That’s okay. Time was invented to measure the workweek. It’s Mercury retrograde. Stop being so productive. There are far too many things that you’ve been meaning to come back to.