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.