Not originally intended for publication, slightly edited for clarification and privacy.
I practise Pinterest divination often these days. Scroll through the recommendations fed to me and save the pictures which bring inexplicable tears to my eyes, or send washes of intense nostalgia through my body. These are the images that will guide me through this month, I think. The process seems to have no logic — a beautiful image will leave me cold, but something bizarre or not particularly nice will strike a chord for some reason. I don’t question it and allow emotion to lead me. Something I think I don’t do enough of.



I look at the collection I have created this month, March 2024. All of the images are elusive and cannot be located in any specific place or time. Their subjects are pale, concealed by cloth, illegible, overgrown, secretive. There is a lot of lace and ribbons and linen and layered paper. I think they speak to a desire to see things through a haze, to return to something simple and childlike. To turn inward, perhaps.
And yet I feel that we absolutely cannot — should not — do this now.
In Taksim Square in central Istanbul, a large rectangular building has been constructed to contain an exhibition called Bulletproof Dreams. You walk away from the bright, bustling public space into a red-lit corridor filled with dust and rubble, children’s illustrated impressions of life in Gaza mounted on the wall. In the next room, floor-to-ceiling screens play the animated drawings of 6-year-old Gazan child Mona. The final wall says, large, red text on black: This is where you choose to look. Seeing demands work.
The world is falling apart. I don’t know how to reconcile doing the things I need to do to stay afloat in my own life and not sink into a hopeless, useless state with my overwhelming sense that we should all be out on the street, shouting, all the time. I am furious with our leaders, and with the unempathetic and the unpolitical.
On Twitter I scroll through images of Palestinian children with missing limbs and the flooded dam in Zaporizhzhia, interspersed with decontextualised snatches of celebrity gossip and identity politics. I look out of the window onto the street below and see children in fluorescent jackets walking two-by-two supervised by young teachers. I see a tweet which says that there are four times as many landlords as teachers in the UK. I see a tweet which says that the main political parties in the UK have united against a new logo on the back of a Nike football shirt. I see ‘influencers’ speaking about liposuction and teeth whitening and gritting their white teeth on livestreams when people ask them where they stand on active genocide.
Yana is in Tbilisi, where she walks all of the routes we walked together in summer 2022; sees the same woman who sold me flowers she’d just taken out of the bin, and the Ukrainian aid sticker I stuck on the gate to the courtyard where I lived. Back then, the impact of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was still a prominent topic of conversation in the UK. Now people in the pub seem confused and tell me I “look sad” when I talk about that summer.
After a month in Kazakhstan, Turkey and Georgia, Yana will return to Russia tomorrow. The country where last month Alexei Navalny was killed; where this month the first arrests were made according to the new anti-LGBT law; where today terrorists opened fire in a concert venue. In the elections last weekend, Putin won 87.8% of the vote. No one in London who I spoke to about it had anything to say. It’s terrible to watch the person you love be forced to return to a country which is against their very existence.
I’ve never found it easy to think about the future, but now I find it impossible. The places one could go might not even exist in a year’s time, swallowed up by the sea or destroyed by greed.
One image I saved on Pinterest caught my attention and I reverse-searched it on Google Images. It is called Le chêne à la vierge (The Oak of the Virgin), and it is in a forest near Rannée, Brittany. During the Terror of 1791-2, local priests who preached in support of the revolution hid in the forest and created devotional spaces. It said that one day a young girl praying before a statue of the Virgin Mary, hidden in a niche inside the oak, was shot by the republican soldiers who came across her when she refused to give up the identity of the priest who had created the sacred place. After that, it became a site of pilgrimage.
With Lily next to me, I put the coordinates into Maps and pulled up the route from Paris. It’s only a ten hour walk. I selected a random town along the route and decided that’s where we would sleep, plotting how many days the whole thing would take. Moments later, we read that the tree was burnt in summer 2018. What remains is a pitiful replica of what it used to be, the arched shelters for the madonnas no longer painted in rich green, but in black.
On one of our last nights in Istanbul, Yana and I watched Paris, Texas. The main character, Travis, walks through the West Texan desert for four years, searching for Paris, where he has bought an empty plot of land with the intention to live there with his now-missing wife Jane and their child. Even after he is found and his brother comes to pick him up, Travis cannot stop walking. He escapes the motel room he is left alone in for mere minutes, and resumes his compulsive, seemingly directionless stride through the massive empty space, searching for the place which symbolises his imagined future.
As is probably obvious from my sudden and slightly manic desire to make pilgrimage to a tree in Brittany, I miss walking like this. I used to walk an average of thirteen kilometres a day last summer in Cambridge, between home and university and therapy and my childcare job and my pub job and my grandmother’s house. I made endless convoluted circles around the city, back and forth all day, headphones in, Circe’s Riot Of Sunlight on repeat (“…we’re walking for miles and miles and miles and miles…”) It feels like there is nowhere you can walk quite like this in London. So I want to escape, but when I do I feel unmoored.
I am grateful that I have so many people in my life who would resonate with things I have written here. Nostalgia which can be almost incapacitating in its strength: Lucas, who once made me a mix of sounds from our time in St Petersburg and brought me to tears in an airport, and Poppy, who sent me a text fragment from the train to Batumi today, reflecting on our summer in Georgia. The urge to stand in the street and scream: Anastasia, one of the bravest people I know. The desire to walk and never stop: the pilgrims, and Josie, who walked in circles around Cambridge with me.
Two days ago it was the Spring Equinox, the moment when the Earth’s axis and orbit align so that both hemispheres get an equal amount of sunlight. That means it is spring now. I hope we will find it harder to be hopeless and useless in spring. I hope that the extra daylight will help us see.
very beautiful piece, tilda. thanks for sharing