“There is a light on in her bedroom,” Turner wrote. In June, the poet Sherri Turner went viral after posting a Twitter thread about her experience revisiting her mother’s old house on Street View. I am not the only person to connect with Google Street View on an emotional level. I found my little nan walking to the shops. I spent so many afternoons waiting for my mother in this spot that it feels as if there is an imprint of me forever leaning there, a ghostlike presence for today’s students to bustle past. I can feel the cold stones under my hand as I trace my palm along the wall. He flails for a moment before freefalling feet-first, and then I am a teenager, walking the passageways of my youth. I drag and drop Pegman, the Street View icon, outside my old school. I am on my sofa in south London, walking the streets of my former home town on Google Street View.
Only I am no longer a sullen teenager and I am not in Canterbury. And then she arrives, and I slam the car door shut with more force than is needed. I am irritated and worried I won’t have enough time to finish my GCSE coursework that evening. I shift uncomfortably in my non-regulation high heels and watch the other parents come and go. I can feel a flinty knuckle of rock pressing into the base of my skull. I rest my head on the stone wall, which is obsidian smooth with the occasional sharp edge.
I am leaning against a wall outside my secondary school in my home town of Canterbury, waiting for my mother to pick me up.
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