Editor's Note: Spring 2018

Spring at the Advocate is a time for leaving.

School wanes, days get hotter. People trickle

out of Cambridge in ones and twos and then all

at once. Cardboard boxes pile up on the sides

of streets, lled with the expendable matter of

college life: textbooks and miniature trash bins,

cheap desk lamps and plastic shelves. Students

haul them into basements, stack them up in

identical rows, and let them sit for a while, as

they coat with dust and suffuse with the smell

of peat. Then, at a certain point in May, casual



goodbyes gain weight. As our friends say good-

bye for the last time in a while, “see you soon,”



we respond, not knowing if we will.



 



We’ve always found it uncanny and sad

that a mass of people can disperse so seamlessly,

like fog in sunlight. Your social life warps and

shrinks as the people you run into every day

become elsewhere. But the Spring issue comes



to you from this nonspace; our writers and art-

ists bring you with them as they go home, here,



and away. Fittingly, these pages present visions

of worlds in constant transit: mighty kingdoms

dissipate into playgrounds, geological history is

reverse-engineered, empress dowagers are wiped

from the record-books, and the distant past grows

tentacles to come knocking on our collective

front doors.



 



Open it up and let it take you there.