Wear
Read slowly. Scroll down when you like.
Hi. If you're reading this, it has already started.
This letter wears out. Every line you leave behind loses a little of its shape: first the letters bend, then they turn into symbols, then dots, and in the end nothing is left. You can scroll back up to look, but it won't mend.
I thought of it while remembering the websites I used to visit as a kid. One with cheats for a game nobody remembers. A forum where I learned to make my first page. The site of someone I didn't know at all, who wrote about their dog. I didn't save any of them.
One day I went looking for them and they were gone. A 404, a domain for sale, a casino page with the same name.
They say the internet never forgets. It isn't true. The internet forgets all the time; you just don't notice, because what disappears leaves no gap.
Here it does. Look up: what's coming apart is what you've already read. It takes up the same space, it has the same shape, but it no longer says anything.
The same happens to us with what we read. You remember there was something, where it was, roughly what it was about. The exact words are the first to go.
That's all right. Things are also the gap they leave.
If you reload the page, the letter comes back whole, as if you'd never read it. That one is a lie, but it's the only one I'll leave you.
— Joe Doe, November 2026