On Permanence

Please do not touch the full stop at the end of this sentence It is load-bearing.

Everything you put on the internet stays there. Your first username. The photo from the work party. The review you left a toaster in 2014, all four paragraphs of it. Somewhere a server is keeping it warm, and it will keep it warm long after the toaster is gone.

This page is the same. It was written once, carefully, and it is not going anywhere. You could close the tab and it would still be here. You could come back next Tuesday and find every word exactly where you left it, which is more than can be said for your keys.

People find this comforting or terrifying, depending on what they posted. The archive does not mind either way. It does not judge, it does not forget, and it never lets go of anything it has been given.

Some things are simply too heavy to move. Mountains. Pianos. Opinions formed in a comment section at two in the morning. And this paragraph, which is probably the most permanent thing you will read today.

So read slowly. There is no hurry. Nothing here is going to disappear while you are looking at it. That is the whole point of a page: it holds still, and you do the moving.

A note on the full stop. It is an ordinary full stop, slightly heavier than the others, and it has been there since the page was made. It does not do anything. Full stops never do. They sit at the ends of things and make sure the things end.

In closing: permanence is not a feature you switch on. It is what is left when nothing pulls hard enough. Nothing here pulls hard enough. Probably.