She Came Back
In early 2009, I started this website with Hannah—me a designer from Berlin, her fresh out of fashion school in Munich. It was meant to be nothing, just a junk blog, somewhere to throw ideas around. Neither of us understood what we were actually getting into.
Within a few years it had turned into something that mattered to people we didn’t know. They followed along with what we were doing, and some of them became actual friends. We poured everything into it—so much passion it felt like the whole thing might split open at any moment. We brought other writers on, dealt with agencies and online trolls, made endless mistakes and learned from them, tried things no one else was trying. I ended up writing about the messy everyday stuff; Hannah was the one who could write about pain and love and impossible feelings in a way that made you actually stop and feel it. When she went to Tokyo for a few months, she sent back these dispatches about what she was seeing. We’d take trips together and she’d write about those too. I even wrote her a love letter for a newspaper once—something ridiculous and completely sincere that was really about how much it meant to be building this with her.
But that’s what happens when two people work that closely on something they both care about. Eventually you start to hate each other. Little things at first. Then bigger things. By late February it was too much. We were screaming and crying and we just wanted it to stop. So she left, and the whole story we’d built together fell apart with her.
And now she’s coming back. Starting today. We tried living separately from something we’d created together and it didn’t work. She saw it first, believed in it when it was nothing. This is her project as much as mine, maybe more. I think we both realized you can’t just walk away from something like this. It’s too much a part of who you are.
She’s going to settle back in slowly. Writing again, handling the stuff that piles up behind the scenes. And having her back feels like we finally found our way out of something that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. You don’t just build something like this with someone and then leave it. Not really.