Note from the Editors

“When I texted a friend about her writing and typed “I live you” instead of “I love you,” I kept it, because it was more true, because I live her everyday, scribbling on napkins and schoolwork and office papers like I do with this strangest love letter, you faceless human, how odd it is, I bet we are the same, in this very moment?” — “I LIVE YOU” by Iride.

Nothing exists to be solitary. We are all in combination, all in conjunction, all the time: “house” is not—cannot be—“house,” without “dining room” and “bathroom” and “room you shouldn’t have let your dad decorate”; “room” is not “room” without “rickety floorboard” and “ceiling fan stalling to the rhythm of a song whose melody you don’t remember” and “memory of every version of your family ghosting around the dining table like digital artifacts on poorly converted JPEG files”; “life” is not “life” without “people” in every form, of every background, everywhere. The natural condition of the universe is connection—a connection which produces as much unexpected harmony as it does discord. 

When zoomed out, you don’t get to see a homogenous totality of humanity. Instead, we have a sometimes jagged and at times uneven mosaic that might look something like a face, or a heart, or a smile. It’s just as if you were to approach the two interlocked lips of “The World Begins With Every Kiss” in Barcelona, not realizing until four feet away that the mosaic is composed of hundreds of photos, each representing individual instants of love and freedom.

This is what we’re trying to capture with Aster Lit’s 15th issue: the floorboards we’ve stepped on, the dinners we’ve had, the doors we’ve slammed, the letters we’ve written, and the tesserae that interlock somewhere between the soul and the skin to make us who we are.

In reading a story, we see a finite set of individual letters and characters, alone until pieced into words, each slotting neatly into sentences like children lined in an auditorium, standing in blocks that we call paragraphs on paper but which on dirt we might call legions, classes, congregations, or clubs. That’s why we publish them. These units of storytelling and language allow us to get at the whole range of human experience, be it the pink-skinned knees of a childhood that never was (“Fair Weather,” Michelle Li), the bitterness of a family insulting you in a native language they think you don’t understand (“How to Be a No Sabo Kid,” Julissa Mendoza Robles), or the intimacy of a friendship experienced upside-down in trees, as saints in reverse (“Saltwater Saints,” Alexis Wu). 

No letter, no word, no sentence, and especially no person, is without place and significance in this world. We’re all piecing our lives together, all finding our place in the fusion. Matthew Chi’s doing it with the bones of warm sagol (“Isaiah 30:26 and Tteokguk”). Milo Coleman does it on expired film rolls (“untitled 4”). Farida Yahaya Tijjani’s tesserae are the stilled limbs of a deer (“Still Life”), Emma Byun’s the vignettes of the body (“Skin Deep”). Every detail is the universe creating itself, coming into focus and form through us. There’s something to celebrate in that. 

At the end of the day, we are a we because of you, dear Asterisks. We are a constellation, inexistent without its stars blooming bright against the inscrutable background of the cosmic microwave. Every editor, reader, writer, follower, and supporter is a tessera in the mosaic of Aster Lit, and we thank you for this every day, infinitely. 

We hope you follow us on Instagram (@aster.lit) for more literature, artwork, and cross-cultural connections, and send us more of your work once submissions open. But no matter what you do, please remember: the world begins with every moment. Seize it. Live it. Write it. 

We love you. Your voice matters. Keep telling stories.

With all our love,

Elizabeth Rotunno (Co-Editor-in-Chief) & the Aster Lit team