Although we wouldn’t associate Spring with existentialism — this is a season much more often likened to the tones of a gentle epicureanism — it is not surprising that after a year that has seen the level of social upheaval and large-scale devastation upend too many people’s lives across the board, we’d be walking into a more reflective era.

How do those tiny moments, seen only by the individual eye, land in the grand pattern of Global Moments?

How have I impacted the people I remember throughout my life, and do they remember me?

Does the powerful play still go on, and do I still dare contribute that verse?

Differences in tone, format, and thematics notwithstanding, one shared thread knots the twenty-eight pieces contained in this issue: contemplation. Some ponder the power that communication holds, the weight of expressing and withholding love with it, and the fluctuating meaning of words from one language to another; others muse on pop culture iconography, and Death put on an ambiguous pedestal in figures like Evelyn McHale and the Lisbon sister from The Virgin Suicides; others yet ruminate on living in between: between cultures, between races, between moments in time.

These twenty-eight authors touch upon people and places that have marked them indelibly, upon stray remarks and significant silences that have shaped them, upon questions they have always asked, or have only begun to consider. Love is almost had and positively lost, disappointment and shock come knocking unannounced; but while there is wistfulness, there is certainly humor and tenderness emanating from these stunning works, a simultaneous reminder that nothing lasts, that everything can be recovered.

As we idle into Spring, with all its transformative, and deeply metamorphic connotations, let us embrace that gentle introspection, whether it is turned toward this mercurial present, toward the melancholy that the past invokes, or else toward the future, still opaque, still very unfocused, and yet very much there.

Let us always wonder, and be unafraid of the strange doors this wondering inevitably opens.