Mirage

Our lives are stuck between two parallel dimensions of reality and illusions. By standing at an external point, we would find that real life itself is a coalescence of imagination and material facts. Reality is a question of perspective. As we stand further away from the past, the events that have already happened seem concrete; yet, there is more room for imagination to fill in the spaces that memory has forgotten. The objects of human desire make up the goals and dreams that wait to mingle with an uncertain reality further down the road of time.

Imagine the mirage: an image burned into a horizon of sand. It is an illusion within a reality, a sheet of water shimmering in a dreamlike subconscious. We stumble towards it, with the belief that we are almost there; yet, the image grows further with each step taken towards it. We know that mirages are merely a trick of the light, but they are no less a part of reality than the warmth of the sand beneath our feet. Like mirages, illusions are woven into reality.

Turn the page and tread the boundary between the real and the imagined. A thinning divide in an old woman’s mind that separates a violent criminal from a long lost husband. The coexistence of mankind’s megalomaniac beliefs and the cold, temporal reality. A longing for a carefree past of children’s games that, in this day and age, seems more and more an unreachable memory burned in the dryness of our minds. Place your feet into the burning sand and you will see that in any direction, past or present, there exists an image composed of both the concrete and the imagined, a mirage.

The oasis ahead a dry and long road is a blurry border between fact and fiction. We invite you, dear reader, to observe the world at the border where reality intertwines with illusions.

—the Editors, Summer 2014

---

Table of Contents

Poetry

Marian Park: An Empty Calculation
Amy Huang: Ebb and Flow
Aileen Lu: Olly, Olly, Oxen Free
Irene Han: Temporal
Bobby Ma: The Ark
Kristen Wong: Tin Love

Prose