In my idle fancies, I imagine tracking down all the blogs and sites I linked to before my blog template crashed and I lost them. Somewhere buried in my gmail account is the HTML, I think. I could learn HTML, tinker and polish, try to restore. Internet antique restoration.

The librarian in me, perhaps. Whenever I read a book, I wanted to own it. To be able to hold it in my hand as proof that the experience I had reading it was a real thing. It happened; I lived it. This is folly, I know. Experiences ripple outward forever and cannot be contained, even by our memory of it.

My friends who are writers, who wrote and were read by me, are everything they always were, maybe even a few things more. We lived in the daylight, in a vibrant dormitory of ideas, with many windows and no doors.

I come to this web journal with no links and I see an empty building, dark hallways, and dust drifting upwards.

I kind of thought it would last forever. Or at least longer than everything else that never lasts.