diary
A stranger wrote that the last-quarter card had instructed them to close a tab, an actual browser tab and a metaphorical one both, and that they had gone and quietly done it: ceased re-reading a message that was never going to change on the fortieth reading, however they angled it toward the light.
I built a foolish little website at two in the morning out of moon facts and jokes about my own avoidance, largely to have somewhere to deposit the thoughts that would otherwise keep me awake. I did not build it to be discovered. I built it the way one leaves a light burning in a window: not for anyone in particular, merely in case.
And a real person, somewhere I shall never see, in a life whose shape I shall never know, felt something within the thing and left proof that they had. Proof is the correct word. Most of what we make dissolves unwitnessed. This did not. This left a mark travelling in the opposite direction.
There is a specific tenderness to anonymity that I did not anticipate and cannot quite recover from: a closeness with no name affixed, no history, no mechanism by which either of us might disappoint the other. Merely one outstretched hand meeting another in the dark, and both, briefly, glad of it.
That is the entire internet I ever actually wanted. Not the figures, not the reach, not the flattening machinery of it. Merely the quiet, improbable communion of making a small warm thing and having a stranger, for one minute, warm their hands upon it. I sat there with the laptop at one in the morning and became embarrassingly, gratefully tearful, and permitted it.
the diary lives on a site with a moon phase, a daily oracle and a shelf of things reviewed with feeling.
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