Chloe Colvard
There are people organizing in most communities across the country and doing other forms of it in other countries to figure out: how do we take care of each other in the context of not being able to physically be with each other in ordinary ways? And it’s just extraordinary seeing both the intensity of this desire to help people you may never meet and the creativity and figuring out how to do it. –Rebecca Solnit
As I am writing this I am discouraged. In recent time, we have seen and felt trauma at such an extensive, deeply personal, and deepy individual level. In a time where life has felt as though it has stopped, yet is moving too quickly, it can be easy to ask ourselves questions. Questions about how the world operates, where it is damaged, where we stand and where we fall, and how painful hitting the ground can feel.
In order to love ourselves, we are often breaking ourselves. We are breaking leases, we are moving home, we are slowing down and speeding up all at the same time. We are grieving the murders of human beings, while also figuring out what it means to be a good one. We need writers, and even when we don’t feel like we need ourselves, we do.
We are entangled with ourselves just as we ought to be, but we are also entangled with each other. Right now, my grandmother is navigating a computer for the first time, as she joins her newly-digital book-club. Right now, my phone is chirping at me as I share laughter with my staffmates, even though I’m alone in my apartment. My stomach hurts and my eyes are tired. Sometimes it helps to know that other people are hurting with you, even though that doesn’t make it okay. Writing, for me, is the ability to process that.
Have you ever heard someone say, “put that in writing”? Have you ever noticed that the things that bond us to our apartments, the laws and the legality that rule modern-day life, is all in writing? I feel as though now, more than ever, we need writing in order to reclaim its power.
I have experienced the entanglement of abuse. I have experienced entanglement between two people, who on paper, loved each other, but in life, chased each other throughout my childhood home. Just as I was entangled in a situation that I could not control, I was also entangled in stories. I would sit, and perch, and sprawl on my stomach, and caress the pages that told the story of a girl who falls down a rabbit hole to escape a reality that she did not understand. Now, as the girl has grown older and the books have grown heavier, the girl caressing the page is still longing to understand, and connect from a minimum of six feet away.
Right now, 12th Street is connecting in an entirely new way. When we meet, we check in with each other. On Slack, we share memes and jokes—and where to get a vaccine. At our Open Mics on Zoom, we applaud each other. 12th Street is a support system, something I’ve leaned on, and that I’m grateful that I have.
I am proud of the journal’s ability to change. Whether that be a transformation of physical issues to digital, a redesign of the website, an exciting pitch that becomes a new section of the journal, or a transformation of self through a team that is held together in similar ways as a family is. I am grateful for the opportunity to be a part of a staff that I have seen every Friday for three years straight. I am grateful for the days of in-person karaoke nights after class, just as much as I’m grateful for after-class Zoom-hangouts. Things change, people change, but community adapts and continues. I am grateful for everyone who makes 12th Street what it is, for every submission, every author, and every editor.
This word “LOVE”—discredited, “clichéed”—can be restored and love, the instinct, the impulse to care for somebody in the hope that somebody will care for you—plus our language, the language, a language—is about all we have. With everything else going on, this is what makes us, what keeps us human.
Toni Morrison