If You Think You’re Drowning, Let It Take You

The following is the Letter from the Editor featured in Issue 004 of The Reprise. The full magazine can be found at inesmeow.com/magazine.

Dear readers,

This issue is themed Tidal – an exploration of cycles, rediscoveries, and what’s left when the water goes out. A tide is the most reliable thing the sea does. You can set a clock to it. And still we tell it as a story of loss or grief — low tide as the beach empties, the water gone, the boats left leaning in the mud, the smell of the exposed river-bed impeding on your otherwise fabulous happy hour. But the receding water is the only thing that shows us what the shore has been holding all along. Low tide acts as disclosure, while also marking that the heartbeat of the sea has reached its depths and will begin to rise again.

I asked for work about recurrence and what remains, and what came back surprised me with its insistence on water as the medium of both grief and of return. Across these pages people wade in and beg to be reclaimed; they board the windows against a storm already inside them; they drift under and decide not to surface; they watch a body come apart and understand, finally, what it was made from. The sea here is almost never scenery. It is the thing that takes, and the thing that gives back, and very often it cannot be told which it is doing. If you read carefully you’ll find that nearly everyone in this issue who loses something is also, in the same breath, being handed something they didn’t know was there.

The etching paired with this letter is called “Celery Root.” There is a moment in the 1996 Emma — Gwyneth’s, of course — where the homely root vegetable acts as a vehicle for a desperately affectionate Mr. Elton to align his tastes with Emma’s. The secondhand embarrassment of watching such characters attempt to navigate their feelings and desires always leaves me feeling tenderness towards human nature. We are overcome with waves of bravery, then embarrassment, then exhaustion. None of which are inherently more powerful than the others, if you choose to remember how strong the tides are, and that while it doesn’t feel like it, your head does in fact stay above water.

So let the water go out. See what it leaves you. It always comes back.

Yours at low tide,

Inés E. Atterbury