Editor's Remarks

        I have come to think of this year as the hurting year. Everything hurts. All over. The world. Compromised bodies. Troubled minds. Broken hearts. How do any of us dare do it all again, every day, with one foot just barely in front of the other? In such times you become certain you do not have what it takes. Who has been in human struggle and not, at some point, known also this to be true; that when you think you can't get through, somehow you just do. I don't know about miracles, but I do know about enough pain to make you not want to do it all again, every day, and I know that that feeling passes and I don't know how, and I know many (just in my own family) for whom it never passed, they are missed and I do not blame them for throwing in that proverbial towel. It is a hard life, wherever you go. It's not easy to stay. It's not easy to leave. There's no easy to this thing.

           These are dark days and we'd rather not remember. And yet here we are, you and I, in the midst of a pandemic, sharing our impossible stories with a crazy kind of hope that it matters to tell such things to each other. That a poem or a song or anything really, where your heart meets your life can make a difference, even when the gap between what the world needs and what we have to offer seems so huge. There is something in all of this that must be for something more than vanity, and more importantly; for someone. Maybe you're hurting right now in a way that no one else can see. Maybe something in these pages will speak to the places you hurt, the places you live. A good story or poem can take you there, can unearth reasons to do it all again. I know. For me, not so long ago, it was these words by Jorie Graham; "are you sure you want to kill yourself? Do you not, maybe, just want to sleep it off again this time?" That's what a poem can do when your heart meets your life, that's not vanity, that's how we heal and help each other up.

          A thing branches out where it is wounded; Eigen says. We don't know how, only that we are sometimes there to see it, in someone else, in ourselves. Like Frederick Buechner, "I'm talking now about what it means to trade with your pain". Here, trade with us. Let someone's words draw out a map of why and wonder. Let us break stories. 

          The psychoanalyst, Michael Eigen, writes of a psychotic patient who took to sleeping in sewers at night; he had a home but he needed to get down that low; he had to show people the very place that he lived mentally. Eigen sometimes worried; was he being unethical, should he have the man hospitalized? Who knows what it takes for another person to heal. For this man, sleeping in sewers was the only way. He survived and managed to live the rest of his life medication free. Sometimes the world opened up and colors briefly sang audibly to him in the park, but they no longer swallowed him whole. He lived a good life. From sewers to sanity, we are sometimes there to see it. If this place be but a bit of that, then we are trading with our pain for we know not what. Something. Glorious. Maybe.

        It is language, Celan says; the one thing that remains after all the losses. The wordlight that we each live a life by. And yet, there remains, for many of us, a yearning to be understood in a wordless way. Does it ever happen? Is it always as extreme as sewers? Can it be just this coming together that we sometimes do, laying out our maps, comparing routes, offering tips, wishing each other well on the long road ahead. Offering what little we have - to the world. 

         "Pain is negation of everything that seems precious," writes Frederick Buechner. "But pain", he says, "pain is also treasure. And it seems to me so significant that we can come together in places where there is a sense of safety. And, as we come together and try to give each other the most precious thing we have to give because in some sense or another we love each other, what we give each other again and again is our pain. The most precious thing I have to tell you about is the sadness. You don't have to talk about pain, but you have to live out of your pain. Speak out of your depths. Speak out of who you truly are. And when somebody says, "how are you?" don't say, "I'm fine." Maybe just say, "Well, I'm not so good, how are you?" Then let the conversation move. Talk not about it, but out of it. And, I mean, literally talk in this place."

        This is what it means to trade with our pain. To trade with the pain of another. And another and another. "A promise to fill for a moment the empty parts, to retrieve all of the losses, to find all the  empty boxes." -Galit Atlas

       And knowing, as we do, that it will not last, we still would not have wanted it any other way. To know that we are not alone does not always make us feel less alone, not right away. These things take time, lifetimes. But that somehow, whether in a sewer or on the page or among kind and understanding strangers, such as you and I must be for one another, we let the conversation, not about, but out of our lives, move us closer to something like home. Maybe even something, who knows, like whole. 

        Here are the maps, the stories, the reasons. Join us. The road is long. And as I never tire of this gentle reminder, try to remember that "No one belongs here more than you." -Miranda July


James Diaz
Founding Editor
Anti-Heroin Chic