Sitting at the campfire, sparks crackling between hums and murmurs, I don’t relive moments of my life. Instead, each recall of a past comes smudged with human error—to remember is to revise rather than perfectly retrieve. Each single moment feels like a letter, word, or disjointed sentences etched into a chapter of a book. It’s as if every time I trace my fingers along the corridors of text is the last time I can do so. Like any information we consume, a new trove of emotions and understandings reveal themselves on the second revisit, third revisit, and so on. 

Nothing in history is absolutely novel in itself. I believe our thoughts, societal innovations, and market products are all amalgamations of preceding artifacts and processes that led up to a destination. For example, our understanding of the fundamental atom was a process where biologists advanced theories through combining the details of previous models with novel information of the time. From John Dalton in 1803 to Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg in the 1920s, the atomic model was one perfected through refinement and revisiting our past. By continuing to build upon what we know, evolution and progression becomes inevitable despite.

I always believe that my hands reveal how I spend my time and what I love. My passions are silently transmitted through the calluses bitten into my fingertips after playing the cello, or the dirt clumped underneath my nails after gardening, or the charcoal smeared across my palm after drawing. Even if I were to eventually lose the momentum that drives my bow across the strings, or my shovel into the soil, or vine across paper, I will never lose the tracks of the past in the texture of my hands.

For me, palimpsest symbolizes attempting to rebuild, yet being unable to forget what was once there before. It’s erasing again and again on a piece of paper, yet still failing to wipe away the faint outlines of graphite. In reality, we are always building upon the ruins of what we toppled ourselves, from cities to the unwanted history caught between two pages of parchment. However, I hope that Issue 16: Palimpsest acknowledges what lies underneath the surface, pointing out those very lines of graphite smudged away from the light. to the unveiling of a fresh wonder.