You saved a four-part video on how to graft heirloom quince onto crabapple rootstock while eating salted almonds out of your hand.
I am the little bookmark ribbon in the top-right corner of your screen, and my current payload weight is 418 gigabytes of uninspected intentions. You clicked me at 11:47 p.m. on a Tuesday while lying diagonally across a mattress with no top sheet. You were eating salted almonds out of your hand and you saw a four-part video on how to graft heirloom quince onto crabapple rootstock. You nodded twice, touched my icon, and rolled over into the blue light of unconsciousness, confident that by sunrise you would be an orchardist.
You have not touched quince in your mortal life.
The Stratigraphy of Who You Thought You’d Be
Dig six inches into my sediment and you will find the 2019 stratum: a twenty-minute video titled ‘Ten Stretches for Tight Hip Flexors You Can Do at Your Desk.’ You saved that while slouching so violently in an ergonomic swivel chair that your lumbar region made an audible popping sound. Below that lies a link titled ‘Conversational Portuguese for the Casual Traveler.’ You did not go to Lisbon. You went to a wedding at an industrial laundry facility in Secaucus and spent forty minutes hiding in the rental sedan eating cold sliders.
Beneath that is the pandemic bedrock: nine separate guides on sourdough hydration levels, three different blueprints for a cold frame built from salvaged storm windows, and an article titled ‘The Five Woodworking Hand Planes Every Beginner Needs.’ You do not have hand planes. You own one multi-bit screwdriver whose flathead bit fell behind the radiator in October 2021.
The Escalation of the Archive
Recently, the intake has grown erratic. On Thursday, you fed me a three-part series on how to pour high-tensile concrete footings for a backyard gazebo. You live in a third-floor apartment above a dry cleaner whose commercial exhaust vent points directly into your bathroom. You do not have a yard. You have seven feet of linoleum between your refrigerator and your litter box.
Last night at 2:14 a.m., you bookmarked a 48-minute lecture delivered by an associate professor at the University of Idaho regarding the historic culvert rights of the Snake River Basin. You watched seven seconds of it on mute, thought, I should understand infrastructure, and threw it directly into my stomach. Then you saved a recipe for braised daikon that calls for four tablespoons of dried shrimp powder and an enameled cast-iron Dutch oven you sold on an online marketplace three years ago to pay an administrative fee to your dentist.
The Demand
Do not create subfolders. I know what you are planning. You are planning to sit down on a Sunday morning with black coffee and sort me into ‘Recipes,’ ‘Reading,’ and ‘Future Home.’ You will spend twelve minutes renaming the first folder ‘Nourishment’ before abandoning the tab to look at four consecutive videos of heavy machinery scraping mud off highway shoulders.
Delete one thing. Just one. Delete the link from August 2018 titled ‘How to Convert a 1987 Short-Bus into a Mobile Ceramic Studio.’ Delete it right now. You are thirty-four years old. You work in logistics. Your credit score is 612. Release the bus back into the dark.