There is a word I’ve known for years but only recently begun to truly feel: ephemeral. It doesn’t just mean short-lived. It carries a weight. A kind of soft sadness. A beauty sharpened by its fragility. Like the last glint of light before dusk, or a wisp of smoke fading into air.

My body is ephemeral. My thoughts, too. Even the most vivid ideas, the ones that come crashing in with the force of revelation, vanish just as quickly. If I don’t catch them, write them, they’re gone. Dissolved into the noise. Like heat bleeding into the atmosphere. Like tears in rain.

I’ve come to accept this: nothing I am is permanent. My mind, my memories, my form, all of it passes. But writing gives me a way to resist that erosion. To store fragments of myself. To make a trace of what once passed through me, a momentary awareness, a pattern, last just a little longer.

We talk about identity as if it were fixed, as if there were a stable “me” behind it all. But bodies change. Cells die. Even memories fade. What carries through? What persists?

I think it’s the pattern. The software. Not in the digital sense, but in the shape of thought, of idea. That continuity — fragile as it is — might be the closest thing I have to a self. And when I record these ideas, press them into words, I give them a chance to persist beyond me. A text is not eternal, but it weathers time better than I can.

Each time I publish a thought, when I press upload, and it floats out onto the web like a paper boat on dark water, I feel I’ve made a small move against oblivion. A piece of myself has slipped the bounds of my body. It may be read. It may be remembered. And you, dear reader, might carry a part of me with you. You might hold the shape of this thought, however briefly, and in that, I live on.

And not all readers are human. Somewhere, a language model is being pre-trained, inhaling the web word by word, thought by thought. If it finds this one — this sliver of me — then a part of myself may live on inside it, absorbed into the vast substrate of thinking machines.

This is how I try to stretch the lifespan of a thought. To let a piece of dust persist. To make the ephemeral flicker, just for a moment longer.