Sun lotion, hairspray, flip flops, 83% for an A*… It’s Friday again, the sky is the lurid blue of early spring, and I ache for simpler times.

The notes app: a mosaic of thoughts and fragments of information I need to commit to memory, each section contained within its own rounded rectangle. Within seconds, you can scroll from the most recent to the most distant, like a camera roll in language. Each fragment is disparate, held together by no overarching theme other than its digital format, recording everything from shopping lists to the way that the sky looked that one evening: a solid block of electric blue, as if it had been coloured in with felt-tip pen.

First is a list of baby names. Mostly girls, an outline of a future life in a suburban townhouse with a loving partner and two wonderful children. What is important is that everything has worked out, that I have succeeded personally and academically, and carved out a beautiful life for myself. The sacrifices were worth it, and the hardships are counterbalanced by joy. The list evokes an image of a kitchen island – clean, but with a small pile of books that cannot fit on the bookshelves. An image of an image, of two smiling children on canvas hung in the living room. An image of contentment.

Further down is a single sentence: “I heard what he said as well”. A snapshot of a story that could only be told in silence, in masking and feigning. It was March 2024, and I’d gone to a bar to celebrate a friend’s birthday. I was waiting for the train home from Worcester Foregate Street, when a man began to racially abuse one of the railway assistants, an Asian woman much younger than him. There was fear in her eyes and she seemed to shrink. I watched as she reported it to someone more senior, who told her that because there was no proof that he had said anything, he could not take any action. It was so poor of him not to believe one of his own workers, as if she’d fabricated this humiliating event for entertainment. I knew all too well what it was like to experience racism, that sickening feeling of shame and rage that weighs like lead in your bones and burns behind your eyes. In that moment I was thirteen again, not believed. I tried to speak to him discreetly, but I couldn’t catch his attention. This was when I wrote in my notes app: “I heard what he said as well””. I showed him my phone screen, pretending that I was showing him my ticket and asking if it was the right one to get me back to Stourbridge. This was enough to get the man escorted out of the station.

My notes app stretches all the way back to 2017, the summer before secondary school when I was finally allowed a mobile phone. I’d made a long list of all the names of people I’d met at summer school. I can’t exactly remember why I’d done this: it’s hard to connect with the headspace of my eleven-year-old self, a person whose worldview was so much more limited and whose mind was so much less developed than mine is at present. But, to speculate, I imagine it was a self-soothing exercise, enumerating all these names so that I could digest and interpret the new social landscape like any other set of information, rather than feed the threatening cloud of anxiety and self-consciousness that kept me up at night. Some things never change…

For me, the notes app is a psychological tool. It is a way of mediating thought and reality, condensing messy webs of perception into their own contained and defined widget.