New Beginnings — Letter from the Editor

There is something delightfully ironic in this issue’s theme—New Beginnings, released at the tail-end of the school year, on the exact date of the last day of my high school career. I've always wondered if this was intentional (and maybe I should check with the rest of my core team at The Sapphire if it was), but I think I might even prefer it more if it wasn’t. It reflects reality in a very satisfying way—in evolutionary biology, death is an adaptational necessity, and maybe this is a rule that holds true for everyone and everything in general.

I’m writing this on my second-to-last official day at WISS. To be honest, it doesn’t feel much like a beginning, or even an ending. Although I am aware that things are about to change for me, I just can’t help but default to constancy, even as everything else starts moving on, maybe without me. Looking back, I think that all of us have the tendency to exist like we’re slogging through life—we spend much of our time counting down the minutes on a clock, waiting to get out of school or to go to bed. It's only in hindsight that the gravity of how much our lives have changed really impresses itself on us.

So on my last issue of the Sapphire ever, in the last piece of writing that I will ever produce at WISS, I'm thinking about endings, and new beginnings, and their ironic closeness. As the year draws to a close—as winter finally thaws away, as we start having to head home in the sweltering Shanghai mid-afternoons, as we all confront the reality that we will have to eventually depart from the familiar—we should remember that everywhere you look, things need to end for others to begin anew.

We’ve come back with this issue after a long break, and in a sense, this is a new beginning for us as well! What we bring to the table now is not what we offered four or five months ago, just the same as everyone else in the world. I’d like to thank all the writers and artists that have—and continue to—create incredible work for our little passion project, as well as the WISS marketing team for helping us facilitate all these changes. Last but not least, thank you to my core team—Jolene, Sara, Lulu, and Simone, you’ve really helped turn this into something that I can look back on with pride and satisfaction.

Wishing you all well on this newest chapter!

Oceania