This month we welcome Anna Dlugi and Mason Scurry, whose voices — like the vivid flashback that kicks off the second installation of “A Tower No Longer” — draw upon the past to look toward the future.
Sometimes the former informs the latter. Sometimes it clouds our judgment: the story “Reparations,” revised for the first time since 2020, is told by a narrator who finds himself more lost for his fixation on the past.
You can careen down an interstate, just short of a hundred miles per hour — all the while with your eyes glued to the rearview mirror. Staring us down when the dust cloud dissipates, the past (both recent and distant) remains a permanent fixture on the horizon.
I think of this concept often when I go running: I wonder how much of me is my history (spoiler: every part) and how many pasts I am found in — how many people I remember can dig through their lives and find me there, for better or worse (spoiler: I’ll never know). I wonder what they think when they are reminded of my name, and if I recall them beyond what’s healthy or normal.
Lately when I run, I’ve been putting on a 3OH!3 album that came out in 2012. One of my favorite tracks is aptly titled “Déjà Vu.” It always seems a fitting soundtrack for this train of thought.
Memory is a dangerous thing for how easily one can become lost in it. It is also one of the most powerful tools a society can utilize to propel itself forward, if its members are aware of how to learn from rather than replicate it.
In many ways, the precarity felt by several of this month’s contributions’ narrators (fictional or otherwise) is a fitting snapshot of the past decade’s zeitgeist.
As a nation, it feels more so than ever as though we are being pushed forward by the promise of a return to ideals, to lifestyles, that no longer exist — tempted by the same urge that might drive someone to leave their ex a regrettable voicemail or visit a childhood friend going to school in another state.
Whether nostalgia is good or bad may be subjective: I know only that running the whole two miles with my head turned backward will slow me down if done in excess. How much is “too much,” I can’t say for sure — one day that answer may catch up to me, in the form of hindsight or otherwise.
EJ Haas
Editor-in-chief
