From the Editor

Everything you didn't understand

Made you what you are. Strangers

Whose eye you caught on the street

Studying you. Perhaps the all-seeing

Illuminati? They knew what you didn't,

and left you troubled like a strange dream.

It was a chance meeting (a coincidence or synchronicity depending on your view) on a night after work, that time when we hope to take off the mantle of attentive listening. I arrived a few minutes late, an indiscretion left unchallenged outside of the confines of the office, and found my friend at our familiar spot, with even the chairs comfortable in their distance from the fireplace. The picture of relaxed ease was abruptly interrupted by the presence of a stranger. My friend was talking to somebody neither of us knew nor recognized as familiar to these surroundings. Overcoming my initial sense of being both excluded and intruded upon, I relaxed into the seeming inevitability of at least a short triangulated conversation filled with pauses that uncomfortably mark places of difference, like struggling Venn diagrams unable to find zones of overlap. Sitting down next to them was followed by the perfunctory and uncomfortable exchange of names that did nothing to answer what the three of us were doing talking to each other. A conversation began and I quickly found myself intrigued; our uninvited but amiable guest disclosed some details of her profession—a researcher in immunology. What initially seemed like a great divide between the psyche and the gene evaporated in the conversation among meeting minds unburdened by theoretical details.

“We are starting to look at cancer cells as our own immune system gone awry, that part of ourselves initially designed to protect is now involved in a confused and insidious assault upon that which it once sheltered.” Our guest had disarmingly engaged both of us, each mind curiously participating from its own place but simultaneously absorbed, affected beyond the self-limiting constrai