A Step Closer to the Undefined

Mariana Campos Rivera

I never used to be worried about distances. I believed I could always go as far as I wanted, even if it was momentarily. I could go from the buried-in-cement lake where I grew up to see boats navigate the Baltic Sea. My job would take me to the Caribbean, the slopes of La Malinche, and the ice and salt-topped landscapes of Latin America. My hobbies would take me to psilocybin-full cabins where at a thousand meters above the sea, I could still listen to the ocean waves crashing as a lullaby, and then, they would take me to live on a socialist island.

So, I was not scared when I decided to move to the cold prairies. It was far but not that far…or at least that is what I told myself as I packed in my purple suitcase sweaters and jackets that would not do much for me during the Winter. And I’d be back. I would. I kept telling myself that every time I felt the daylight was too short, the language was too hard, the academia was too white, and the money was too little. That helped because I discovered I could always bring myself back to where I belonged, no matter how long the distance was.

Little magic rituals would help me beat the distance. Sauteing tomatoes, white onion, and garlic, Hominy corn exploding in boiling water, looking at paintings of women having a beer, drinking blue cocktails you know you will regret having, thinking of hummingbirds, admiring the eyelashes of the cows. I had found these little pieces of myself outside of me, and they tried to keep me grounded, confirming that I was real, as if there were reassuring me that I existed not only in that moment but with all my history.

I believed that this technique would keep me safe from both the nostalgia that thinking of the familiar home created and from the uncertainty that the future inevitably brought to my anxious soul. Work, friends, family, my body, my mind. Everything is impacted by this duality of searching for myself somewhere else but feeling extremely rooted in things so abstract as a home, an identity, and memories.

But one day, I went back. And I did not find the familiar home. My identity was blurry, and the memories were contradictory. I found instead that places change, people die, babies are welcomed, jobs become dull, and inflation goes up. And everything I thought would be there was not. Nothing waited static for my return, and even in the day-to-day, the known setting showed itself as a myriad of foreign possibilities. I had changed too, and without noticing it too much, I started to gather in my soul new ways of being, new feelings, new ideas, new “MEs”. All were familiar and mysterious, reachable and abstract, here and nowhere.

By moving, I created an infinite landscape around me, both my past and my future surrounding me in every direction. Memories, feelings, ideas, all so distant yet so intricately part of me. I have closed and I have opened venues. Even what was sure now seems unknown. All I can see now are clouds, the moon big in the sky to one side, the warm sun saying goodbye on the other, and in the middle, me, looking at them as if it was the first time ever. And it is only now when I feel the freedom of the living skies.

Out into the Distance by ANN

B. DONALD

Let Me Live by

RACHEL JANZEN

Acrylic paint on a wood canvas

Beyond the Horizon

by ANN B. DONALD

Horizons of Life

Anonymous untethered and uninfluenced infant with starry wide eyes endless horizon curious and adventurous youth’s dream of a world at feet expanding horizons cautious and bridled adult with accumulated experiences riveted horizons sanguinely sage and accomplished old age of wisdom at peace compassed horizons

Unlock the fearless mind unfettered by stages, limitless the world, my oyster

Erin Gilbert*

faces & figures & farces font types sales font types contents demander comment on rate comment on change supplier comment on attire comment on balance comment on a joint chairs roses comment on a point six cent secrets formation = flatter + fornication font type fade demander & supplier blesser & abuser quitter.

* Instead of seeing the horizon as the line between land and sky, I chose to interpret it as the line between public, performative acts of love and the private, often precarious state of loving. “14/02” is completely bilingual with one half of the story represented in English and the other half in French.