Dear friends,

These days, which have been some of the sweetest of my life, have imbued in me a kind of fear I haven’t felt in a long time, one we certainly all feel when things are unknown and words are unsaid, when past conceptions of futures dissolve and it is as if the dirt path you’ve been trodding ends all of a sudden and there’s just brush up ahead. Sweet, ecstatic fear, like the smell of honeysuckles in the spring; I feel it all the time. I wonder and pray and precipitate all the time. I hope and grieve and grow all the time, in the face of this fear, this not-knowing. 

These days, everything is yellow—the sun, my cold brew, the dandelions, the feeling I get when I am taking it all in. I want to show you this flower I found, come look, it’s just around this way. Do you see it? It’s growing right up out of ground that was frozen only a little while ago. Now it is yellow. It used to be snow and desolation and memories of past times and now it is yellow and alive. Hello, little flower, hello little miracle. I decided to follow the flowers, the pretty little terrifying things, to whatever end, maybe to no end. Maybe I will be walking around in this field forever, bending down and looking at all the flowers, being terrified by how they smell, by the tenderness of sensation. But each flower I smell will be growing up out of the ground and will tell me the only truth there is: You are here. 

I have been taking Zyrtec for spring allergies.

In fear and ecstasy,

Sasha Rotko, EIC