i visited your website today.
snow fell for hours, quieting the din of the city many stories below. tonight, my apartment was a haven, illuminated only by the keen blinking eyes of computer towers and thermal printers, and the glow from street lamps off the snowed sidewalks. an uncased hard drive hummed and sputtered by my feet, like that ancient hound dog you grew up with you used to tell me about.
i scrolled through your homepage, the multiscan CRT reflection gleaming in my eyes. i thought about when this code was young, vernal in your hands — when you touched its first HTML file and began to sculpt. i opened the source code to look and be recklessly forensic, and it felt like standing in your room after you had gone out. the <links> and <meta> tags tucked neatly into the <head> of the document, holding tales of style code and preloaded fonts and opengraph fragments; i found them to be electrifying doorways into the way your mind must’ve been working.
but in the late-night snowlit half-dark of my apartment, i strayed not from the HTML. i imagined when it sat across from you, long before it sat across from me — a localhost apparition, quickly taking form as you guided it. semantic and strong, tongue-in-cheek language and lovely fleeting feyfolk animation, you made it how you imagined it. you drew rectangles and you pulled them into mandalas, permalinks and <p> tags and sheer wonder, loomed by your careful fingers from the very aether of the ‘Net.
i visited your website, and in all its brand-new-day, digital fresco Sistine Chapel wonder, i found myself touching hands with you.