Mercurio in Retrograde
Between Boxes and Stars: Musings on my online roleplay love interests and the Mercury in Leo retrograde preshadow while relocating. #DAWNOFTHEMACHINEELVES
New summer love will have you scouring your Spotify saved songs like your wardrobe trying to find something that feels fresh and fits the vibe, and realizing there's really nothing to put on. Today is one of the last couple days of the Mercury retrograde in Leo pre-shadow, that period of time before Mercury appears to reverse course, which serves to give us a taste of the miscommunications and frustrations to come before it hits full force on July 17th. Retrogrades aren't so much an affliction as they are about reiterating previous lessons, although technology failures are always forecasted with the rising summer heat. Electronics are, after all, still subject to the laws of physics, so if you have stuff that needs backed up on your harddrive, now might be the time to do it.
The moment after orgasm, the last day in our house, I stepped through the maze of boxes stacked against the walls that already felt quietly dispossessed on this summer's day in Cancer season, smelling of dust and incense and things that had gone untouched for months or even years. I was still hungry for you. The idea was to scope out my new living space and see how much of my stuff I could move, and to where. I went over to the house next door and peered through the windows at more eerie nearly empty spaces with some boxes already stacked up. I didn't have the keys. I tried the back door but everything was locked. This is what it's like for me when everything is under someone else's control. A ghostly quiet, haunted stage set to "read-only," silently rejecting of my efforts to assert my autonomy.
I'm chased by the nagging thoughts of needing to find a steady job again, needing to get out, needing to move back into the city before it’s too late so I can give this independence thing one last shot, even if I burn out again. I was hospitalized twice in my 20s with rashes on my face or uticaria that spread over my whole body. I think about how I need to give up both coffee and weed, recent studies showing that disposable vape pens give people lead and nickel poisoning. (There were no studies on disposable cannabis vapes and the studies were on brands in the United States, but I'm not optimistic.) Moral OCD gives you a warped sense of what actually constitutes harm, but you see the way that this leadened, stunlocked, post-COVID approach to life has hardened people into what you can only liken to NPCs, devoid or care or empathy, and in fact reticent to even focus their full attention on anything. The weight of the knowledge of karma's inevitability is heavy. There are no harmless highs. There is no free lunch.
But then there was you. Mauricio. Mercurio - That was what I accidentally called you when I named the archetype you came along and occupied in my life, when you inadvertently completed me. The moment I fully fell for you has already become shrouded in amnesia. Getting matching tattoos before you've ever met someone is taking "it was written in the stars" to a whole next level. The snake, the staff, the wings. Mine was a modified astrological symbol from Greek mythology, the rod of Asclepius, inked upon my left arm in March 2023: I have written about it before. The wounded healer, the centaur; not quite man, not quite animal. Something else, cursed with divine purpose. The one who is poisoned but cannot die, the one who is sick but learns to heal. Yours was from Full Metal Alchemist, in the same spot, your left arm. I've never seen the anime. Now I guess I have to. It was a reminder that the convoluted, winding path, from astrology, to alchemy, to hermeticism, and dabbling in every flavour of Western esotericism, wasn't all spiritual masturbation that had come to nothing before rediscovering my indigenous ancestry. The painful realization that the thing I had been seeking had been staring me in the mirror my entire life.
Everything comes full circle. Everything is connected.
My mysterious attraction to you bloomed overnight, unexpectedly, shrouded in a darkness of unknowing like a flush of mushrooms, about the same time I started having more struggles with my online roleplay relationship with Hasan.
I smiled when I realized I wasn't in control of any of it.
Mercury is the messenger between the humans and the gods. The way he moves, nimble and quick-witted, frequently gets him classed as a trickster. The trickster isn't evil; the trickster is on a divine mission. But there are two sides to him. Shades of his character show up everywhere, including the staff of Hermes emblazoned on hospitals and ambulances, where the connotations of his association with commerce (over healing, the meaning of the symbol of the rod of Asclepius) echo with dark resonance upon the modern healthcare industry.
I stepped out of the energy of unworthiness when I rejected the biggest leftist Twitch streamer in the world and his breadcrumbs in favour of you. We'd been on our way out for a while, but as for why I picked you? Truthfully I didn't know. I didn't know about the tattoo, I barely knew anything about you. I just always noticed you. Unbeknownst to me, when you picked up the camera to film the basketball game back in March - after he banned me from his Twitch chat - was when I started to really fall in love with him, so who's to say I wasn't actually falling in love with you all along? When you appeared in the frame, I felt glimmers of attraction, something I'd previously thought was impossible as I'd identified myself as demisexual after having multiple people tell me within the same year upon describing how attraction worked for me (regardless of my voracious appetite). Initially oblivious to conventional measures of attractiveness due to a kind of face-blindness, it took a solid 2 months of watching Hasan's content for attraction to kick in. It didn't take that long for you.
A good girl, faithfully, I rejected the impulse at first blush. Hasan and I were exclusive and there was no reason to rope anybody else into our game, or at least that's what I decided to go with when I wanted to probe this new feeling of being regulated by the consistency of someone's presence and masculinity. I had dropped all my other roleplay partners. That's not normally how the game is played, but I decided I wanted a muse to help heal my attachment anxiety and see where things went. Plus I both feared and was turned on by his jealousy and possessiveness. I was shocked by how parasocial Hasan's Discord server proved to be, but it seemed a strange shadowy release valve for being too parasocial with their streamers being against the rules. Microcelebrities and alt account personas were big in "Hascord", and eventually I caught wind of tales of "splinter Discords" where people who'd become collateral in the mods' almost-anything-goes attitudes formed their own toxic runoff cultures.
I didn't need to prove it, or for anybody to believe me, but the documentation in my blog was there and the energy was still obvious, unless I'm to believe that frequent total crashouts, relentless attacks and furious envy of onlookers just follows the fact of my presence as a natural consequence. Hell, half of me does believe that at this point. That was something Hasan and I had in common, being constantly misunderstood, attacked by bad faith bad actors, and labelled as problematic, among other things. He was very public about it; ever the emblematic Leo, always in the spotlight. He can take the heat. You, on the other hand, seemed to prefer to hide behind a lens, the way I hide behind my words and the AI-generated images that are part of my identity as a transhuman artist.
So Mercury’s domain in the realm of technology and communication is well-known, while Leo is persona and performance: Ruled by the sun, the luminary which embodies the need to be perceived, but within it the discovery that perception can only ever illuminate a mask, a single facet, or an assumed character. Confusion over our masks, and the separation of our public and private personas, is foreshadowed during Mercury retrograde in Leo.
You pulled up your ancestry results on stream and showed that just as much of you belongs to the land as I do. Abya Yala. My mouth shapes itself around the syllables to try on this new name like a coat of feathers, to see how it fits into my existing knowledge and cosmology. A brown man, pale as I, also carrying the sins of the colonizer and the colonized. I looked up your stars and saw you were Scorpio Venus and Mars, a passionate combination that fetishizes intensity, turned on by occult secrets. Before, I had spoken with Brother Wolf. Now it's time to talk to the serpent.
There is absolutely nothing to do except to trust the universe. And ourselves. Fate's gravity gathers its outliers into the same tight, mysterious orbit.