Editors’ Letter: What We Cannot Find on the Outside

Five months ago, we introduced Issue 7 with a testament to independence. We asked what would happen if we gave up our lives as we knew them, abandoned convention, took ownership of our stories, found validity in ourselves and our words, and learned to claim the power we hold. For our cover image, we chose a vintage photograph of two people clinging to one another, breathing into each other’s mouths through gas masks, feeding from one another what they could not get from the outside world. We presumed a great deal about the year to come, the support systems we might need if ever we were to unsettle the dust from the routine of our lives. We projected hope for ourselves and renewal for everyone else, and considered the possibilities available to us in the 11 months we had left to build a proper 2020.  

Two months later we, along with the rest of the world, were thrust into the unknown—this now infamous “unprecedented” era. 

While there have been a range of lifestyle changes for everyone—some people losing jobs, homes, and loved ones in this crisis—much like many things in life, our two experiences looked quite similar. Both in doctoral programs, teaching and researching in our fields, the most obvious change to our daily lives came with the abrupt shift from the interpersonal social dynamics of our respective campuses to the digitized knock-offs of Zoom classrooms and virtual hangouts with friends and loved ones, makeup-free and braless like one perpetual sleepover. Our ever-amazement at our hard-won desires to shake up our lives and experience something fresh and careless, mounting in every phone call and text between us asking if it was possible summer and all things bright and hopeful would just cease to survive without air. 

These questions, of course, are not unique to us. Aside from the obvious financial, physical, and psychological strain that results from a society thrust seemingly overnight into inevitable quarantine, we spent our usual season of renewal and fresh starts digging holes in the walls, unearthing the ugliest parts of human instinct under our fingernails. The shameless gluttony of feeding, clinging, hoarding, barricading—the denial of aloneness within the inescapable reality of four walls and a roof. Many of us have been forced to confront the leaky corners of ourselves, the untended-to, hard-to-reach places we ignore when being human and flawed and afraid becomes so inconvenient. In these circumstances, it’s easy to wonder if we are more scared of ceasing to be, or being alone with ourselves and our choices. 

As for us, we’ve both experienced varying degrees of aloneness, challenging what it means to be lonely within ourselves, our homes, and our relationships, all of which we had a hand in creating months before discovering how much we would come to rely on them. When every decision we make could be the one to cement our sickness, every human interaction alive with the possibility of spreading ugliness all around, we keep mostly to ourselves and watch those around us with caution: never trusting, always doubting, knowing the virus can be in anyone, asking who carries it and where we go to cut out the infection. Through trips to the grocery stores, filling our gas tanks, sitting alone in parks as strangers pass by, masks affixed through all our yearning to return to normal, it’s easy to get caught up in the routine of self-protection. 

But as the world starts reopening, whether or not it is ready, and we watch relationships end after months spent in lockdown have rotted love away, and careers shapeshift under newly-found ambitions to live a more meaningful life, and every part of who we are and what we want comes into question—after so much caution, the realization hits that perhaps we are the sickness we’ve always been fighting. 

And through all these crumbling foundations we read your work, pulling words and worlds from the remarkable submissions we received. We sensed in these stories a voice speaking directly to every one of us still straddling the many versions of what our lives could have been, would have been, and what they actually are, now that the world is changed. Ultimately, through everything, we have compiled one of our most robust, profound issues yet. We are breathtakingly proud of how this issue came together in its muted beauty, its silly uncertainty, and all its raw, human aliveness. 

Now, as we head into the summer we thought may never come, the world is once again coming to life with the shared grief of being human, at a time when human life is so undervalued, and grief is so constant. Once again we breathe deep, behind our masks, and ask one another to take notice: we are still here. Humanity is resilient in its beauty, its rage, its injustice, its protest against all forces intended to break us. We are still alive and we are screaming, both silently and together, through rattling cries and sustained isolation. This issue is the nourishment you have given us; we give it back to you, collected and whole in all it provides. 

We are here to feed one another what we cannot find on the outside.

Erin & Lena
Editors & Co-Founders