The Person Who Built This With Me
When Hannah and I started this thing in early 2009, neither of us had any real sense of what we were getting into. She was a fashion student in Munich, I was a web designer in Berlin. That was enough. The project was a playground—for feelings and instincts and every voice we hadn’t yet figured out we had.
We wrote ourselves open in front of an audience that kept growing. Strangers started caring about what we thought. Some of them became friends. We put so much soul into it that it started straining at its own walls—brought writers in, dealt with agencies and trolls and the grinding machinery of maintaining something public. We made mistakes constantly and learned from most of them and tried new things without much anxiety about whether they’d work.
My territory was always the dirty stuff: sharp edges, provocations, confessions I probably should have kept to myself. Hannah was the heart of it. Warmth and honesty and that quality of writing where you feel like someone is just telling you the truth at the kitchen table. When she spent months in Tokyo she sent back dispatches that made this place feel like it had a pulse in two time zones at once. We went on road trips together. I once wrote her a love letter and published it in a national newspaper, which at the time seemed like the right and completely natural thing to do.
The way it came apart was the way these things always come apart when two people work too closely on something they both care about too much. We fought about small things that turned out to be large ones. By February it had become unsustainable—too loud, too tangled, too exhausting. She left. And with her went a version of this project I didn’t know how to reproduce on my own.
What I’ve worked out since then, slowly, is that something built from that much genuine feeling doesn’t simply dissolve because the people who built it can no longer stand each other. The thing persists. The history persists. And eventually the pull of what was made together outlasts the damage.
Hannah is back. This is ours again. Welcome home, Monti.