A Carefully-Constructed Note from the Editor

‘All the King’s Horses.’

I went through three full-length journals last August, detailing every intricacy of every happening that might’ve alluded to some sense of righteousness in my own mind, some sense of self-satiating salvation. I’ve crossed paths with every page I’ve written over and over, and from these chapters I have extracted–like a magician with strings of fabric up his sleeve–this issue. In that sense alone I have found that farewell letters and love letters are apprehensively amalgamated, that temporality is an unhealing wound. I could be sentimental and say that this issue comes from a place of sincere reflection–but it doesn’t, and I can’t illustrate it as such. It comes from a place of utmost hurt. A place so ultimately universal that I believed it’d resonate with others on the same innate level that it did with me. For temporality does not just pertain to time as opposed to the eternal, but pertains to those most exposed sides of one’s skull. The vulnerable parts that augment a headache from a torrent of tears from temporal tidings, or from simple humanity, or a lack of object permanence. Anything, really. It’s just all very temperamental.

I was told once that writing about time is like trying to balance a house of cards. One wrong streamline of breath and the entire structure collapses in and upon itself–that writing about time is almost as monotonous as the clock that carries it–unless you act like a cuckoo-clock that simply refuses to open its doors and show all, tell nothing, regress a decade and a half, and relearn the basic structures of fiction writing.

I am choosing to tell you everything. In a way, I’ve had to relearn object permanence. My friends like to tease me and say that I somehow managed to skip over the stage in childhood where one develops the understanding that objects continue to exist when they are not seen, heard or touched–since I’ve always just believed that when something left my life, it could no longer exist. That the house of cards must’ve fallen in and upon itself into a pool of ink, obscuring each series of painted images that differentiates this card from that card, and that card from this card. Unfortunately for me, the King of Spades sits, stone-eyed, beneath the ink. Objects continue to exist, regardless of how temporal they are in one’s own sphere. The King’s horses and the King’s men could not rebuild the house of cards, but they could see it lying flat against the wooden table, existing gloriously.

As always, (that funny old world) what’s mine is now irrevocably yours.

Emmanuelle Kate.

The Secret Garden Journal

Temporality / Object Permanence