Dear readers,
We left behind two cardboard boxes in the 305 Crown lobby. Nondescript, a bit beaten up, and full of copies of our November issue—our third as a managing board. Their only protection was a piece of notebook paper with a red-ink note asking to leave the boxes alone or to call us before doing something drastic. Then, we forgot about them for a while.
February is a month where many choose to forget—new routines and hopes discarded. But perhaps some things are stowed away rather than abandoned.
The pieces in this issue focus on this state of suspension—this waiting, the hopes and fears it carries. In our cover story, Megan Vaz investigates the burdensome process of waiting for a fair financial aid package to stay enrolled at Yale, a waiting that is sometimes accompanied by thousands of dollars of debt. Maia Nehme takes us into the lives of formerly incarcerated people who spent months and months in limbo, lacking the promised relief of an expunged record. And Idone Rhodes shows us the pain of parting with beloved animals through Facebook pet exchange groups, which bring both urgency and a harrowing deliberation process.
Where do people end up when their wait is done? Perhaps one answer is the hope that permeates these pieces. For local cinephiles deprived of the Criterion movie theater, it’s a new place to enjoy films together. For some New Haven high school students, it’s a chance to step into the lab. And for cartoonists and musicians, it’s the chance to kickstart their careers.
In January, we remembered our cardboard boxes. But when we went to find them, they had vanished. We panicked—running up stairs, pacing hallways, swinging open closets, accidentally barging into some poor teaching fellow’s office hours. And then, just as we were about to give up, we found them: stowed up high, atop the mail sorter that greets you in the lobby. They were there the whole time, just a little out of sight.
We hope this issue brings forward these bits of waiting and hope, these moments that often happen right beneath our noses, just a little out of sight.
TNJ Love,
The Managing Board