It’s as easy as it sounds in my grandparents’ letters to live a normal life under an authoritarian regime. You love or fall out of love, you go on summer adventures, defend a dissertation. The trains keep running, cows keep giving milk.

Watching Chinese immigrants shouting curt orders to Black workers in their newly learned English was often like observing a failed game of telephone, as the workers’ faces bore quiet offense.

We sent a blast into our social universe asking for the joker to reveal themselves and were met with intrigue but no answers. Superstition says one cannot buy one’s own tarot deck. It must be passed down or bestowed.

“Two girls among the green, between trees. Hands on hips, heads tipped back, eyes searching sky. Six years before Taylor Swift announced her eighth studio album by posting a photo of herself standing in a forest, she posted another photo of a forest holding two women, which she has since deleted from her grid. Don’t stress, it’s not gone. It’s just entered the next stage in the celebrity Instagram life cycle, which means that it’s truly ours now, property of the stans with the prescience to preserve.”

“[The Daniels] work is vital because they each add a necessary extension to what it means to be human. And when grouped together, The Daniels offer a clear retort to that well-intentioned if ill-informed statement: ‘A lot of people of color don’t know their family history.’ Ultimately, people of color do know their families, especially if we continue to find and share the writers who make us come alive.”

“yesterday was funny because you were in a terrible mood but everything was beautiful.”

“I needed to know that others had endured what my family was going through, regardless of the outcome.”

“One thing I like about the Aliens series is the fact of its many, many, pregnant men.”

“Can you forgive me?”