Letter from the Editor

It wasn’t until I started to compile articles to edit that I realized this is our tenth issue. Despite knowing the last issue was the ninth, it didn’t hit me until I wrote ten.

Ten.

A small number in the grand scheme of things, but when you’re counting issues of an independently-owned magazine that’s in its first two years of business, ten is big. Ten feels like a monolith. A waypoint. Hopefully, over time, more tens will come along. One day, ten might feel small— an exit that you pass on the highway at 80 miles an hour.

Right now, ten is the lump in your throat that hits you out of nowhere; when your eyes sting and your ears feel hot. It’s the point on the trail when you turn around and see how far you’ve gone, and it only makes you all the more excited to know how much is left to go.

Ten is just the beginning.

There are times when you’ve gone too far to ever think about going back, but instead of moving forward at the same pace, you run wildly at a full sprint, maybe with one shoe untied or a speck of dirt in your eye, but at that point, you don’t give a damn. You have come this far— a rogue shoelace is small compared to what you already made your way through. Of course, this isn’t to say that there won’t be multiple shoelaces or a pebble in your shoe or a bug that skirts its way up your nose. But now you know how to navigate the splinters better. You check your laces more often. Maybe instead of cursing the gnat, you feel for its misfortunes (this all depends on the rate at which gnats come to their end in your nostrils).

However you take the trail, you take it— running, crawling, swearing at the steeper parts, letting tears combine with sweat, befriending the blister on the back of your ankle.

But, for now, I sit cozily at my desk, clad in a cocoon of wool socks and blankets, still thinking fondly about the coffee I had this morning, wondering if one year from now where I’ll be on the trail. Waving back to myself a year ago, letting her know that the part of the trail she’s coming up on is especially thwarted with brambles. But there are still the sweetest berry patches, even if they seem small.

Hopefully, a year from now, at almost 27 and working on a 16th issue, I can look back on this stretch of the trail with that same lump-in-yourthroat feeling that I have now. I can take the time I need to see how far I’ve gone but feel all the more ready for what’s to come.