Editor's Remarks

        Nicholas_T CC



    Time does not always feel like a gift. The body ages ungracefully, the number of people we love dwindle in death or a death-in-living. We can't go back and fix things (oh, though we want for nothing more) the best we can do is to fix a few things in the here and now. Even so, we want more time. With the people who are now gone, with the parts of ourselves that once were so vibrant and seemingly unencumbered (a beautiful illusion) or with the parts of us that never even had a chance to form before disaster struck. If time is a gift, it is a difficult one. 

   There are things we come to know in no other way than through great difficulty. Perhaps it is not at all accidentally said that one must rise to meet a challenge. You can go through something and not meet it. A whole life can take this direction. A good part of mine once did. My early environment did not rise to meet any moment. We were on the descent. The toughest thing I have had to learn in this life is how to fashion my own emotional tools. We are the only ones coming. But that there are also more than a few fellow travelers on that road we come to know and lean on. Time brings them in and out of our lives in beautiful and devastating measure. Sometimes it's but a moment in time. And a moment is enough. We can hear a thing said a million times before, but sometimes it's the way someone says something to us that helps it to land. Timing. Tone. Timbre. When something lands it lands. It goes in the tool box. 

    All of the work here, for instance. It lands with me. And it is but a moment in time, and it cannot last, but the feeling does. The purpose, the why of us, why we are here, why we reach out, why we even try at all to describe all of the things that have happened to us in our lives. I tend to think it matters greatly that we meet each other in this way. Meet a moment, or a feeling, or a loss the size of everything. 

    How easily the trees let go of their cover in Autumn, we think. But why should it be any easier for them? We know as much about a tree's struggle as we do our own, and we know so very little. And just that little bit is enough. We can do a lot with that. Maybe it's a struggle for everything in life to let go. Letting go / letting in. Making room for more. How do we ever? But sometimes, don't you? 

    With the little time we do have it is good to not stand alone in it. Even if it's only for a moment, and the tide is high, and it seems all of our work is written on sand. Who knows what the sand remembers of us on the washout? Surely, we each made some small difference here. We have learned our way through on the roughest terrain there is; in here, our own hearts, our own bodies, our own minds. But it's the meeting of others; hearts, bodies, minds, that makes for a richer crossing. 

   Thank you all for being on this stretch of the journey with us. For sharing your stories of moment-meeting and heart-connecting, your how and your why and your rising. In this moment in time I feel extraordinarily grateful that our unique and differing paths have crossed, here, in this way. I hope we meet again. And even if we don't, this small and tender moment was enough. 

    Happy Fall, and safe travels, friends. May you all rise and meet your difficult thing in your own unique and beautiful way, and in your own time. 

James Diaz
Founding Editor
Anti-Heroin Chic