Comfort has a price. When you have it, youāre a willing participant, cocooned in its luxury. Your world is grounded in the known, leaving even the new and unbeknownst to jive with the rhythm of the ruling rumba: familiarity.
When you donāt have it, you are thrust outward as though freshly hatched, plucked from stasis and put to spinning toward some blind-guided inevitable conclusion that has yet to congeal past the āwhat if.ā
I am on the precipice of comfort looking out between crossed fingers that web and mask my eyesābut my feet betray me. Whether bought out by the Red Wing boots that encase them, or aching in anticipation from untreated fallen arches, I am moving forward. Itās with these words that I say goodbye to a comfort that I have known for long enough to cause pause with every present keystroke. This is fin, fatal, and finaleāitās finally, because Iām ready for whatās next.
Iāve been with the Other Press for over four years now and have worn that same number of hats at the paper (Contributor, Arts Editor, Editor-in-Chief, and Layout Manager). In that time, Iāve had aspirations of becoming a writer blossom and wilt, rediscovered a passion for visual design, and had the great opportunity to fail, succeed, and learn with a cast of characters that have transformed my expectations of myself; progressed my understanding of what I value in life; and challenged to redefine friendship in their sheer superior handling of the craft.
To say my time at the Other Press was important is not only exceedingly bland and unfulfilling, it lacks an awareness of the space that I have been generously provided.
During my time at the Other Press, I have been built up, dashed away, and re-imagined. I am a patchwork of experiences, that started the first time I begrudgingly hauled myself into a collective meeting and gave my first, likely awkward, certainly meek in delivery āhello.ā Comparatively speaking, second goodbyes donāt come quite as often.
Lacking in many things, second goodbyes are void of the bittersweet that causes you to hold your words in doubt, like a poker player with the odds against you, pushed all in.Ā So Iāll call: I love this place and the people in it. Itās more than that, because it doesnāt even have to be this space, or these faces, because weāve all been here. Itās what it represents: one of many moments in your life when you belonged and had comfort.
Later days,
Cody Klyne
