Issue 15

15SUE: Smoke and Mirrors, 

The fifteenth issue reflects on the unclassifiable, file this under I’m not sure it happened, and it probably will never happen again for us to be able to prove that it did the first time. A summer with no parties, afternoons that go on for thirty-six hours, a full moon once a week, that seem to suggest a kind of impermanence to the state of the world. The most striking realization though, is I am flooded with regrets that I didn’t know I had. 

I spent one full month in New York, February, the shortest month, before I went back home to Atlanta. I look back selfishly at early spring as though my life was regressing to its teenage state: being told exactly what I could do and where I could go with a curfew hanging over my head, and driving down the road was a thrill. I could look out the window and see people experience whole spectrums of tragedy and grief while our own neighbors denied their heartbreak. The memories I have of going to live concerts in the city or having dinner in a friend’s apartment seem so lost, it’s as though they are images conjured in my head from listening to someone else’s stories. But I thought I had time. I was once convinced that lights would turn green for me, but I have since arrived and realized that there was no point in trying to get anywhere faster than anyone else. It’s the giving up on the compulsion of efficiency, it’s the droning sounds of cars exiting the highway one by one that lulls me to sleep at 1am. 

We might find ourselves non-spirited, approaching a horizon to establish a new frontier, pioneers who uproot what others have sowed, gathering as “survivors of a peculiar and inward time,” doing better. I am so excited for our editors and contributors to have the opportunity to reflect on “smoke and mirrors,” a concept that in itself suggests ambiguity, creating a future in real time, not knowing when or how it will appear. 

-- Kayla Herrera-Daya, Editor in Chief

Coming soon…