As I write this, according to space and the internet, we are in Mercury’s pre-retrograde shadow. The little planet slows to a crawl before appearing to go backwards overhead; this is the ground that Mercury will have to re-cover after its retrograde is complete. Things from this shadow period have a way of coming back then, and we revisit them with new perspective, retrace our steps to find the things we might’ve lost track of the first time. 

There’s so much angst and hand wringing about the crossed-wires and hijinks of Mercury retrogrades, but I find the idea of these shadows to be really heartening. Rereading, revisiting, and rediscovering are fun. We get our sliding doors and second chances. Getting to be curious about familiar things is a powerful and fruitful position to inhabit: the pieces in this October issue of the Triangle House Review all look over their shoulders at their subjects before looking forward again, untangling memory and foresight in ways that resonated with and delighted me.

“Of course I did it for the memory,” begins the speaker of Zach Halberg’s poem “Villain Song” before confessing to losing grip on an imaginable future. In Christina Drill’s story “Small World”, a flailing graduate student returns to her hometown and discovers, among the people she used to know and the things they once did, the kind of person she might one day become. This issue’s interview catches up with Sarah Jean Alexander and Lucy K. Shaw as they reminisce about the disjointed experience of time over the last year, about the beginnings of their joint publishing project Shabby Doll House, and about the influences that brought their forthcoming books to fruition. Gabriel Chazan reviews Maggie Nelson’s latest book, On Freedom, a decidedly forward-looking text from the beloved author of The Argonauts that wonders how best we can inhabit the present in order to build the future we want. And, of course, the irony isn’t lost on me that debut essayist Haley Patail writes about remembering and revisiting Amnesiac, Radiohead’s undersung follow-up to Kid A that turns twenty this year. Each piece is also accompanied by the sketches of Sasha Fletcher, glimpses which move and smudge and breathe the way that our own slippery memories often do. 

The pendulum swings backwards and forwards; each piece is its own little time-travel. 

Happy reading.

— Past Yash, writing into the future to Present You