The Shape of an Absence
There’s a moment when a team stops being a team and just becomes a list of absences. It happens slowly at first, then all at once, and by the time you can see the shape of it, the balance is already gone.
Ines left first. She’d always been impossibly stretched—full-time job, distance learning, the rest of actual life crammed into whatever margins were left—and I never stopped being slightly amazed at how she managed it. When a book project came her way, the math became simple. She chose the book, which was exactly the right call, and I hold nothing against her for it. I’m still waiting to read the thing. But her leaving was the first fracture in something I hadn’t registered as fragile.
Hannah left a few days later. We’d had a fight—the specific kind that accumulates between people who’ve built something together over years, where every unresolved tension suddenly arrives at once with a reason. We both felt it: one conflict too many, and nowhere comfortable to go with it. She decided to leave. I tried more than once to talk her out of it. She wasn’t having it—said it wasn’t fun anymore, that she wanted out. So I accepted that, because I didn’t have a better option. Five years at each other’s sides. That’s a strange thing to sit with.
After that the rest moved fast. Asumi buried under exams and stress with nothing left over. Mischa touring poetry slams and readings, living out of a bag. Raphaela never quite finding her footing, which I’ll own—I didn’t make enough space for her, and that’s my failure, not hers. I was watching the task list grow while the people attached to it quietly disappeared. Eventually I made a call: strip it back, run this journal with Sara alone for a while, get enough air to think straight again.
I loved that team. Genuinely. Every one of them—passionate, deep, likable in ways I couldn’t have manufactured. And a lot of what went sideways starts with me. This thing takes time every single day, and between hunting topics and writing copy and contacting agencies and negotiating ad rates and patching technical problems and feeding social channels and translating and sourcing images, I wasn’t good at making the people around me feel like they mattered. That’s the honest version.
What I can’t make peace with is the decision to take it public. Hurt feelings turned into grievance performance, private conflict dressed up as a call to arms, people urged to turn against this journal, against Sara, against me—because someone got lost in the idea that they’re the wronged party here. Most of what’s being said is one-sided, a lot of it is simply not true, and none of it belongs in front of an audience. Hannah and I have five years of friendship underneath all of this. I’d rather we find a way through it that doesn’t end with lawyers. We built something worth more than burning it down over this.