Summer’s here; as if it isn’t, we’re all still talking about what it’ll be like when it begins. We want everything out of it, and it’s possible we’ll get it. I keep going to restaurants and thinking: I’m in a restaurant! I’m easily made happy now, sort of. We’ve been promised a new hedonism. We’ve been promised new strains. Seems like either might drop any day now! And waiting is a freeing thing. When someone asks me a question lately I answer it with “Who’s to say?” because who is? Are things happening yet? Whose America are we in? Nothing feels possible to know for sure. We won’t know what we’ve been through until we’re through it. That building collapsed! Nothing’s forever and the ground isn’t even the ground. We’re too heavy on our foundations, and we’ve been ignoring the strain. 

To welcome the season we’re sharing an issue that seems, to me, shaped by a telegraphing of disconnection, confusion, uncertainty, dysphoria. Each piece reminds me a little bit of a distress signal. In Hannah Kingsley-Ma’s “Sign of the Times,” a woman takes up with a ghost who seems to understand her in a way her partner can’t—or won’t—and then starts to fear she doesn’t quite understand herself. In Kaycie Hall’s “Amy,” two coworkers build an intense bond around the now-alien mundanities of workplace drama, uncertain the whole time of what they really mean to one another. In Eve Ettinger’s review of Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show, we’re asked to rethink our collective understanding of the narrative of the AIDS epidemic, admit that we’ve been told a story that’s not exactly right, and get angry about it. In this issue’s interview, Yashwina talks with astrologer Claire Comstock-Gay about the contradictions and complexities of writing horoscopes—missives people cling to when the right answer’s out of reach. In Sophia Le Fraga’s “Elegy,” the rituals of courtship are inverted, put on hold; one day, she half-promises, things will feel like they should have all along. Even the art—Lisa Frank images curated by Thea—is at the same time inviting and off-putting, familiar and bizarre.

As I’m writing this letter, describing these pieces we’ve all been reading and editing for months, I’m like: Am I getting it? Am I saying what’s true? Who’s to say. In each of these pieces, we’re on uneven territory, but there’s no level ground to get back to. This summer, we were promised, we’d feel the earth beneath our feet. Do we, can we, ought we to?