I wondered if all of us churchgoers were just exhausted by grief. For the dying priest and us, I thought, "God" always refused to become glorious, instead stubbornly remaining plain, a headache, a sorrowful knot of language.

People act as if the internet will never die, that the Cloud will never die. In the face of that, much of human civilization, including our human bodies, seem so defective and mortal and constantly fading. Our lifespan is 80 years, 90 years if we're lucky, and that's a drop in the bucket compared to how long we think the internet will live.

If beauty is only skin deep, look really, really hard.

When I first got on the internet as a tween, I wasn't comfortable showing up in social spaces. I didn't have a loud voice. As a function of my youth and gender, I wasn't given a voice at the dinner table, and nor maybe should I have been. But I thought I wanted one, and I was able to have it online. I wasn't a great talker, but I found these other skills. And when this stuff is described as "not real writing" or "bad for my brain" or whatever, it just seems like it's from people who wanted to keep their place at the dinner table.

I wondered if all of us churchgoers were just exhausted by grief. For the dying priest and us, I thought, "God" always refused to become glorious, instead stubbornly remaining plain, a headache, a sorrowful knot of language.

One of the paradoxes that makes the internet such a suggestive place is that, on the one hand, we perceive it as perpetually in motion and changing, and, on the other hand, it has this god-like immortality to it: It seems like it won't die and is not subject to decay, and that everything can be unwound, unlike present-tense experience, where you can't archive the present moment, you can't go back and read it over again. That's the fundamental hallmark of the internet.

I began to think that melancholy was a dialect that only some people knew-or could even hear-and in my conversations, I sought these people out.