As the month of December dawns—and with it, a biting cold—I’ve found myself often looking in a fogged-up windowpane or a bedside mirror. The face that stares back at me is familiar. I would know it anywhere. Yet, as if by a trick of the light, it is sometimes unrecognizable. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami’s Toru Okada says that we cannot truly know or understand anyone else. What we know of them, if they were a vast mansion of being, is merely the glow of candlelight illuminating the smallest corner. I think the same is true for us. For “I.”

It's true. At times, I’ll do things that surprise me—like getting angry at a stray comment for no real reason or buying the last bouquet of a street vendor. As university applications mount up and I am constantly faced with the word “I,” I turn myself inside out to no avail. Can I know who I am? Can we hope to know who we are? Will we ever spotlight the endless rooms in ourselves?

In the first issue of Serendipity Lit, we start to unravel this conundrum of identity in Hayoon K.’s “Finding My Light Again,” as her speaker wades through a path to “meet” their true self. What “spirits leer, unwelcomed guests / that never leave” in our own souls, Selena Y.’s “me, something extraordinary” laments? Are we always running down a nameless journey, which Allen C.’s “Weary legs” calls “the last stretch?” How can we find ourselves within a “concrete jungle” we christen as “humanity’s hub,” Nathan N.’s “The Bustling City” asks? When humanity inevitably ends, as it does in Ray J., Charlie J., and Kaden L.’s “The Sunset for Humanity,” will we have become more aware of who we are? The complex relationship between brothers in Audrey L.’s “爆” speaks to how the consistency in humans is our possession of unadulterated, pure emotion—such as that found in the unrequited love of Kevin W.’s “Echoes of a Fractured Fate” and the unreliable narrator in Rio N.’s “It couldn’t have been better.” Yet, Dea Y.’s “Serendipity” answers this waterfall of questions in the simplest way possible: through creation.

Through writing, through placing ourselves on page, in the black-and-white of words and all the spaces in-between, we are made anew. The ugliest, darkest parts of ourselves are slowly brightened through each letter we write huddled in our rooms or squeezed between strangers on the subway. Firefly-light, perhaps. Candlelight. The slightest gleam. It is enough.

I am proud of the work we have showcased in our first issue. I hope that you, as a reader, can find something of your own here, just as I have. A piece that is a tiny fragment of light for you to take home. House it within yourself—and, eventually, watch yourself glow.

Warmly,

Claire Z.

EIC, Serendipity Lit