The world’s architecture shifts. Sometimes you are part of the rearrangement, and sometimes you’re only ever catching up to it. Trying to grasp it, that moment of alteration: A walk in-step to city hall. A woman calls a police officer. Music filters through a radio. A child hides behind a bush. A mirror and a man arrive. Whatever shape the moment takes, what unites these thresholds is the fact of irreversibility.

In each, rising: an unanswerable question. How do you carry someone into the beyond? What does it mean when survival becomes institutional? Who does care turn you into? How close can we come to ruin? What is the cost of being seen in a world not built to hold you?

It seems to me a brutal glory that when reckoning with a threshold, each of these essays emerge from a willingness to surface wondering without resolution. To grapple with the rupture and the residue. To face the remaining reality of the shift, which for each writer means bearing a new world left to learn, if it can be known. And if it can't, how then to live with this fact?

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