The Summer Caro Left

Hannah flew in for Fashion Week and we argued most of the nights she was here. Not badly—not the kind of arguing that ends things—but the sustained verbal excavation you do when something you’ve built starts shifting underneath you. Caro had left. Or was in the process of leaving. By that point it came to the same thing.

Some departures are visible from far off and still manage to be disruptive. You think you’ve already processed it, already adjusted for the absence, and then you’re up at two in the morning trying to articulate what the thing even is without the person who helped define it.

What helped was getting out of the apartment. Dinner with Paul, who was just starting his own blog—art, music, design, all the right obsessions—whose enthusiasm made the whole enterprise feel less exhausted than it had been. Drinks with the lil.bit crew, a little too much wine, the kind of night that produces ideas you actually remember the next morning. Katja from Travelettes arriving with the frank energy of someone who hadn’t been inside the project long enough to become precious about it.

The conversations that matter most are the ones you don’t plan. Someone says something sideways and it rearranges how you’re seeing a problem. I came out of that month with a clearer picture of what this journal is for and what it isn’t for. Not because anyone told me. Because the friction produced something.

More people were circling in—writers, people with their own particular obsessions, wanting somewhere to put them. The project was changing shape. That felt less like a threat and more like the natural condition of anything still alive.

What I came out of that month with was simpler than I expected: a clearer sense of what I actually wanted to do here, and who I wanted to do it with. Summer arrived and resolved the thing. I’ll take it.