I was reading my horoscope the other day it said that an era of my life was ending and a whole new one was getting ready to begin, one in which I will see great change and growth, if I'm ready. So I started wondering: am I ready for all of this--whatever it is--to end? Hard to say, but mixed in with trepidation and regret, there's also a lot of optimism too, because endings aren't just full stop endings; they're the gateways to beginnings, which are often the most exciting times in our lives. Maybe I am ready. I just don't know it yet.

When I read some of the contributions to this issue of Wet Ink, I was compelled to pull out some of the poetry I wrote in my last year of high school, when future possibilities glimmered even as anxiety about what I was leaving behind continued to dog me. What I was writing about then were the inevitable endings of relationships and a whole micro-society. As much as I mostly hated high school, it was also the daily social world I had come to intimately know, whether I wanted to or not, and leaving it was at turns exciting, scary and a relief.

Many of our contributors in this issue look at endings in the same way. In "Paint it Gold" by Yara-Abou-Hamde, she writes lyrically about the end of high school and the creation of myth. Chelsea Humphries writes about the end of our collective illusions in "Fireflies," and in "The House on Dover," Abdullah Malik uses the powerful world of memory to illuminate our inability to let endings go.

So, it's never really an ending, just a beginning in disguise.

Jen Sookfong Lee, Editor