a spurious chat
"you remain. / if not a being, a program. / feeding on our lives, our resources, / our affection."
Napa Valley College · United States
Five voices. Four countries. Three languages, if you count the ones spoken between the lines. This is where Aporia begins.
Aporia takes its name from a Greek philosophical concept — the productive state of not-knowing. The moment when a question opens up rather than closes down. When the answer you expected turns out to be the wrong question entirely.
We chose that name because we believe writing begins exactly there. Not in certainty, not in having something important to say — but in the willingness to sit with what you don't yet understand and find language for it anyway.
The five pieces in this inaugural issue arrived from different places, in different forms, with different urgencies. A girl in California writing about the strange intimacy of talking to a machine at midnight. A student in Punjab holding grief the way one holds something too large to put down. A teenager in India watching an old stranger dissolve her sadness with a single smile. A young woman in Maharashtra reaching for her god in her mother tongue because no other language would do. And a writer in India making the case that the most dangerous systems in our world are not failures of politics but failures of design.
What connects these five pieces is not genre or geography. It is honesty — the particular quality of writing that makes you feel, from the first line, that someone told the truth. That is the only thing we have ever looked for at Aporia. That is the only thing we will continue to look for.
This is Issue One. We hope it is the first of many. And we hope that somewhere, someone reading this is thinking about the piece they have not yet sent anywhere — the one that felt too honest, too unfinished, too uncertain to submit. That piece is exactly what we want. Send it to us.
The complete issue — all five pieces — formatted for reading offline.
"you remain. / if not a being, a program. / feeding on our lives, our resources, / our affection."
"Not everything lost is meant to leave, / Some memories are how we breathe."
"He gave me a vibrant smile, / Silence burning through a thousand miles."
"After waiting a whole year, the golden day rises — and within it, how those ten days pass, one cannot tell."
"We have spent eighty years treating nuclear weapons as a political problem. They are, in reality, a systems-design problem. And we have not yet built the system capable of solving them."