Dear friends,

To walk through a home where you once lived, to see someone to whom you once felt connected, to re-read a book you loved as a child—these are often deeply disappointing experiences. The walls of your old bedroom seem much closer to each other than they once did. Your old friend’s eccentricities, the nostalgia for which once propelled you to reconnect, crystallize as the perversions which dissolved your friendship in the first place. That old book, which once seemed dense and full of life, is indeed triple spaced, and the characters who you once felt you knew as deeply as yourself are as two dimensional as the words on the page.

What love isn’t doomed? What memory isn’t dreadful? This, to me, is reason enough to read: for fondness of a past that is not your own, one to which you are unattached. To read is to delight in that which you have not experienced, to walk halls you’ve never seen, to lament the loss of lovers with whom you’ve never lain, to watch films you’ve never rented, and, even, to feel a contained kind of pain.

It is to enjoy a dinner party with friends, when, really, you sit at no table and there is no food; there is only the shadow of a chandelier in a different room, cast against the wall. We don’t all care much for adrenaline.

Soberly,

Sasha Rotko, EIC