today is cohost's final day. in less than 24 hours, it will no longer be possible to post on it, and sometime in the next 3 months the site itself will be gone. alive only in data exports, cross-posts, screenshots, offshoot communities, and memory.

i have nothing to say about cohost's impact on me, or the beauty of its dream, or the hard work of its @staff, or how terribly i will miss it -- nothing that has not already been said in far more articulate ways by far more insightful people.

but i will miss it terribly.

i do not think "things" exist. or, rather -- i do not think "existing" should ever be conceived of as permanence. a human being does not exist for 80 years so much as that is the length of time cellular automata spend building and operating a sapient blood storage and duplication device. all things that 'exist' are ongoing processes and projects. the seas and the mountains are sort of like websites operating on a scale of time we, as 80-year-blood-sacks, cannot really contextualize.

these processes and projects eventually grind to a halt too -- in who knows how many thousands or millions or billions of years it will take, our seas will dry up, and our mountains will become dust. by that time, there will not be humans any more, nor anything that remembered humans, nor anything that remembered anything that remembered humans. and so on.

but those 'things', to us, exist. always and forever. and although the earth will not remember us in the way we do it, it will remember us -- the atmosphere alive with the sounds of our laughter and footfalls right now, the husks of our cities and monuments littering the planet's face long after we're all gone.

cohost was only a part of my life for about two and a half years -- i got to join early in the closed beta, and used it intermittently for that length of time. and although cohost will soon be gone, and i will doubtless have many more years of using the internet, cohost will live fondly in my memory for so much longer than it was around. there is no social media or blogging service or anything else that will escape comparison to it.

it was a project, a process -- a dream, a staff, a community, a conversation, a moment. tomorrow (or, generously, by next year) it will have stopped completely. it will no longer exist.

except: it will. in my heart, and i hope, in yours. we cannot go back, but we cannot ever really leave, either. if i see you in another place, another time, in some not-cohost situation, i hope you will remember it with me.