Planet Dust

Hurtling through infinite darkness, somehow inventing BMX bikes, heartbreak, karaoke, air fryers, and Bros.

I’ve been asking the people I’ve lost for signs lately. The kind of small, private request you send out into the universe when you miss someone. A private conversation with the universe, held mostly in my own head — slightly irrational in the way grief sometimes is. The quiet sort of asking you do when losing someone you love settles into your life long enough that it stops feeling sharp and dramatic, and instead becomes part of your everyday life.

Something small, I’d think to myself.
Something specific.
Something that feels like you.

My wonderful uncle Colin died last year, and recently I found myself asking him for a sign. Colin loved beautiful things. Cool things. Theatrical things. He had taste. Real, instinctive taste. The kind built from curiosity, personality, stories — an adventurous life very well-lived.

This morning, I was sitting in the cafe at the hospital having a coffee after a blood test. The least cinematic location imaginable. Grey floors. Plastic chairs. Practically zero emotional ambience.

Then I looked up.

There it was.

An enormous — extremely rare — Italian espresso machine with a giant gold eagle perched on top of it, improbably glamorous against the grey hospital café around it.

It stopped me in my tracks because years ago, Colin had sent me a photo of the exact same machine with the message:

“Imagine one of these in the shop…”

At the time, I owned a furniture and interiors store with a slightly unusual approach to aesthetics — part design showroom, part curated curiosity cabinet. Colin understood instantly what I was trying to create. He appreciated spaces that felt collected rather than manufactured, where objects carried atmosphere as much as function. The fact he sent me this absurdly beautiful gold espresso machine says everything really. He knew I’d see it not just as a coffee machine, but as theatre. Sculpture. Conversation piece. A little bit ridiculous in exactly the right way. We were peas in a pod in the way that we both loved things that sat slightly outside of practicality. Objects with presence. Objects that made people stop mid-conversation and say, “Where on earth did you find that?”

Suddenly, in the middle of a completely ordinary day, he felt absurdly close again.

Not in an eerie way.
In a Colin way.
A deeply familiar one.

Stylish.
Funny.
Over-the-top.
Impossible to ignore.

The strange thing about grief is that the people we lose rarely return in grand cinematic gestures. No slammed doors. No flickering lights. No mysterious woman appearing at the foot of the bed whispering warnings in Victorian lace.

Mostly they return through the ordinary.

Through objects.
Songs.
Smells.

Tiny ruptures in everyday life that briefly make the world feel less empty than it did thirty seconds earlier.

Only a few weeks ago, I asked Colin for another sign. This time I decided to be specific. Years ago, he and my auntie came home from a holiday to Hawaii, and Colin kept doing the “hang loose” hand sign. Thumb and little finger out. Big grin. He explained that in Hawaii it meant everything was okay. Relax. Take life as it comes. Stay easy.

So I asked for a hang loose sign.

Then forgot about it.

The next day I was having lunch in Port Erin and as I walked around the corner, directly in front of me was a VW camper van with a giant hang loose sticker on the rear window.

Not parked discreetly in the distance. Not something I almost missed. Directly in front of me. The kind of visual punctuation mark that makes you stop mid-thought. The universe, once again, apparently incapable of subtlety.

I actually laughed out loud.

Then, later that same day, I was driving home after a meeting and got stuck behind a slow-moving trades van. I was getting increasingly irritated until I glanced down at the rear bumper.

Another hang loose sticker.

By that point, even I raised both eyebrows.

Then, while writing this essay, I drove home and passed Colin’s old car.

Not Colin driving it, obviously. A stranger. The new owner.

For a split second my brain reacted before reality caught up, the way grief sometimes still does.

There he is.

Then gone again.

Which felt strangely connected to everything I’d been trying to articulate.

Maybe the people we love don’t vanish as cleanly as we think they do.

Maybe they continue moving through the world in fragments.

In songs.
In gestures.
In objects.
In stories.
In old cars now being driven by strangers down familiar roads.

Something more complicated than absence.

My Nanna arrived differently.

I’ve always felt her around me in some strange, unprovable way, but recently I decided to test the universe a little. My Nanna adored Engelbert Humperdinck. Idolised him. My Grandad was a taxi driver on the Isle of Man in the sixties and once picked Engelbert up while he was performing at the Palace Lido — at the time the biggest entertainment venue in Europe, hosting some of the biggest stars in the world. Apparently my Grandad — a very funny, charismatic man — an old-school raconteur who could strike up a conversation with absolutely anyone — chatted away to him for the entire journey before casually returning home and informing my Nanna afterwards.

I think she probably almost lost her mind on the spot.

So recently, I asked her for an Engelbert sign.

“Show me Engie, Nanna.”

Then I forgot about that too.

The next evening, I was watching a YouTube travel video about Montreal because we’re travelling there this autumn. Atmospheric footage of Old Montreal. People eating outside. Street musicians. Warm lights. Wine glasses clinking.

Then a busker appeared in one of the cafe doorways singing:

“Please release me, let me go…” Engelbert’s most famous song.

I stared at the screen as a huge smile spread across my face mid-realisation.

Because really? Really?

And as if all of this wasn’t enough, while writing this piece, I suddenly smelt my Nanna’s perfume.

Nina Ricci.

Unmistakably hers.

For a split second, she felt impossibly close.

She’s been gone for fourteen years.

The week my cousin Becks died, I returned to my car after a client meeting and sat for a moment in the underground car park before starting the engine.

Then it hit me properly.

The reality of her being gone.

I’d already cried, already spoken about it, already heard myself say the words aloud multiple times by then — but this was something physical.

A sudden heaviness in my chest.
A feeling of disbelief so complete it almost felt disorientating.

I remember closing the car door and feeling this enormous reluctance to step back into ordinary life.

Eventually I started the engine.

The radio came alive instantly:

“Don’t think it is tragic, just think of the magic…”

Wet Wet Wet. Sweet Little Mystery.

Becks and I loved Wet Wet Wet. Almost as much as we loved Bros. Almost.

The kind of teenage devotion that involved lyrics scribbled onto paper, Top of the Pops recorded onto VHS tapes, and an absolute certainty that Matt Goss was the most beautiful man alive.

Years later, in one of those strange full-circle moments life occasionally throws at you, I ended up meeting Matt Goss at a Spice Girls afterparty at Wembley after my friend Leigh introduced us. He asked for my number.

If I could have travelled back in time and told my younger self that, she’d have thrown her Raleigh Burner BMX to the curb and collapsed on the spot.

Which is probably the only reasonable response to the fact that we are essentially sentient planet dust, hurtling through infinite darkness, somehow inventing BMX bikes, heartbreak, karaoke, air fryers, and Bros.

The universe is either staggering cosmic chaos or the most committed piece of performance art ever attempted.

The radio kept playing.

“My love has taken a tumble / But I’m still standing.”

I sat there staring ahead in this concrete underground car park feeling, for a moment, like the world had tilted off its axis.

Now listen — I fully understand there are logical explanations for all of this. Human beings are pattern-seeking creatures. Grief heightens awareness. Memory attaches itself to objects and symbols and songs. Smell is neurologically tied to emotional recall. I know all of that.

But I also think modern life has made us so frightened of meaning.

Everything must be explainable.
Provable.
Rational.
Peer-reviewed.
Dragged into the fluorescent lighting of certainty.

Yet some of the most profound parts of being human have always existed in the unprovable space.

Love.
Instinct.
Atmosphere.
Faith.
Art.
Memory.

Carl Jung called it synchronicity. Meaningful coincidence. Moments where the external world suddenly appears to mirror an inner emotional reality with uncanny precision.

Not supernatural necessarily.

Just life briefly feeling more symbolically alive than usual.

That idea lives rent free in my head.

I read somewhere once that the atoms making up the people we love never truly disappear. They disperse. Recycle. Continue moving invisibly through the world.

Which means somewhere in the air around us are molecules from oceans, forests, ancient cities, lost civilisations, movie stars, poets, strangers.

Particles from people long gone still drifting quietly through the atmosphere.

We could be breathing in atoms from Cleopatra while sitting at traffic lights outside Tesco on a rainy Tuesday.

Somehow I find that strangely comforting.

That the universe doesn’t really deal in endings.
Only rearrangements.

Matter becoming something else.
Energy changing form.
People leaving traces of themselves everywhere.

Maybe grief works in a similar way

As dispersal – not disappearance, because even after people disappear physically, they continue existing in strange and intangible ways.

In habits inherited without noticing.
In stories repeated across dinner tables.
In music.
In gestures.
In the objects they once loved.
In the atmosphere they leave behind inside families.

Maybe that’s why certain moments feel so emotionally charged after loss.

Not because the laws of physics have briefly collapsed, but because love leaves residue.

Every now and then, something in the external world brushes against that residue with uncanny precision.

Tiny moments where the membrane between then and now suddenly feels thin enough to touch.

Maybe grief doesn’t make us irrational.

Maybe grief simply makes us attentive.

Attentive to emotional echoes.
To symbolism.
To repetition.
To the strange ways memory keeps interacting with the present.

I don’t know if our lost loved ones send signs.

I really hope it’s true. I guess I’ll find out someday.

For now, I only know that lately the world has felt slightly more porous than it used to.

Maybe that’s what grief really is.

Learning that absence and presence can exist at the same time.

And honestly? If my family are communicating with me through giant gold-eagle coffee machines, Engelbert Humperdinck lyrics and hang loose stickers on trades vans, it feels entirely on brand for them.

Post-Script

A few minutes ago, after finishing this essay, I asked my Grandad for a sign too.

A vintage pink Duracell bunny playing the drums.

The toy he bought me for my third ever Christmas in 1980.

I remember standing there staring at it in complete disbelief that something so fantastic existed, let alone that the rabbit was all mine.

I can still picture it perfectly.

So let’s see how Grandad gets on with that request.

I’ll keep you posted.

Here’s to June arriving at full volume. To the Isle of Man in TT mode — louder, faster, brighter and completely alive. I love the feeling of our whole island slipping into another gear.

And on that note — some exciting business news is coming soon too. New chapters. New ideas. Things I’ve been slowly building behind the scenes.

Stay tuned.

Thank you, as always, for reading and supporting.

Gemma x

P.S. If you liked this post, a quick heart — or even better — a comment below, helps keep my writing visible on Substack and keeps the fickle algorithm happy.