I’ve dreamt of being an archaeologist since I was a little girl. I was obsessed with ruins, structures, and stories wrapped like a caress into scrolls, onto walls, in sand, and in water.
Chichén Itzá, Angkor Wat, The Alhambra de Granada, the Medina of Fez—small breadcrumbs in a never-ending path toward some sense of history. A telescope in which to somehow view the present differently; unearthing truths, moving like a chameleon footprint by handprint through different cultures. Mimetic but also completely alien. The summation of a life and how one lived. There is this sense of sifting through a museum of artifacts, cracked or whole—but telling nonetheless.
At the end of the year, I feel a natural cycle close, and I often wonder what artifacts I will leave behind. Will I be lucky enough that someone will find my writing in a library one day—or is that line of thinking now an artifact in itself? Will someone find my old journal, my favorite pair of gloves, the locket containing a picture of my Grandma Helen? Hideko-baachan. Storyteller.
The beauty and the grief of a story is that time passes as you create it—in the moment that you write it down, things inside you shift. I have often woken up in the morning after writing a long draft to find a story I obsessively complicated with excessive symbols and run-on sentences. There is always the question of how to revise such a fingerprint. Because it is, in reality, the mark left behind by exactly who you were in that moment. How true does it stay to the moment and how faithful must you be to other priorities on the page?
I love the work we do here because you are our focus. You are the magic we try to imprint onto the page. There is a sense of immortality in being enclosed and freed inside of a story. A life that lives to be forever read and resurrected, long after you have retired and departed.
An artifact.
A ruin.
Something alive held together with love, in amber.
As the year closes, I always invest time in looking back at the artifacts we have helped to create for ourselves and for you. I feel a sense of unending life and love for being a part of something always bigger than myself.
I know our family at The Snack does too.
To the museum of 2023 we have filled with love, we cherish you.
And, 2024, we await to curate your stories and what you do not yet know that you will leave behind.
