Nine Years, and Then We Broke
Hannah and Ines are gone. They left out of resentment, and the others followed. I watched it happen with something between defiance and shame—laughing off the storm while it was already pulling the roof off. My name is Marcel Winatschek, and everything I’ve written lately belongs in a bin.
This journal started as a rebellion against loneliness. We didn’t know what else to do with the thoughts, the anger, the things that felt too big to keep inside. So we wrote them down and sent them into the world. And then the world sent back pressure, and money, and obligations we’d never agreed to.
I think about those early years a lot. When this was still just fun. When nobody was weighing every sentence against some expectation we hadn’t set. With every new reader came louder voices and bigger demands, until the thing that used to feel like freedom started feeling like a job.
That’s the moment it stopped being a blog and became a service. Trapped between what we owed people and what we actually wanted to say. Hannah and I panicked, tried to reorganize, tried to carve out space for what still mattered. It was already too late.
The emails, the opinions, the calendar of obligations—it buried us. I won’t pretend otherwise. Excitement became routine and routine became something close to hate. We gave up. We broke. A bloodbath in a cheap hourly hotel would have been the cleaner ending, honestly, if we’d kept going the way we were going.
For a week, all that kept me functional was my playlist and an unreasonable quantity of red wine. And the certainty that this couldn’t be the end. I’d failed, which meant there was nothing left to do but start over. Hope in my chest, Sara at my side.
The obsession that followed didn’t let me sleep. The screen became the canvas, the feeling of a clean start my drug of choice. I wanted to be free again—no obligations, no pointless filler, no frame built for someone else’s convenience. By the early hours of the last day I could finally see what had survived the fire and what hadn’t.
There it was. This notebook, rebuilt. Something between a blog and a magazine, with exactly one goal: to look like itself again. Sara and I can publish five thousand words or a single photo from last night. A song, a video, a rant, nothing—as many or as few words as we want. Nothing counts now except the sheer sum of freedom, personality, and soul.
In my head: Ines, Mischa, Asumi. A little bit Raphaela too. I wanted to thank them for the writing, the parties, the nights, the memories. It was great. Always. And then there was Hannah. I love you, and every moment we shared in those years meant more to me than you probably know. But this goes on.
I don’t always understand my own choices, but I know that Sara and I can still tear this thing open if we approach it right. To nine years of this dispatch—the drugs, the sex, the stories, all of it. To us.