What are my intentions with you?

To my esteemed website,

You are not my first internet presence, but you are the first domain I ever bought. I couldn't spend all that much on you, and so like other things I bought for myself when money was dear you have accrued a tender, nearly painful sort of love to yourself over the years of ownership. I love you dearly, as I've loved every notebook I've ever owned.

There have been many versions of you, or maybe I was right to call you a notebook and it's more correct to say that there have been other notebooks with your name and url. Your predecessors were pretty, but right now I think you're prettier. The point of you is that before you were a thing of the internet at all, you were in every computing device I've owned since 2016; growing, aging, rotting, growing. You're ten years old, and you're a garden with dignity befitting.

But last year, I decided that your concealment was fostering too much neglect. I couldn't understand your insides anymore.

There's large parts of you that I can't read. Sometimes they're straightforwardly illegible, too deep in a context that's since been lost; unrecoverable. Sometimes they're too painful to read over. I've moved and changed, but not quite enough yet to poke at those scars. They'll stay a part of you, because there are beautiful things in there. You're beautiful, and you'll care for yourself without me pruning you for as long as I need you to.

Dear garden, when I started you it was like a faucet had been opened on a cistern – or maybe a lance shoved into a cyst – and I poured, gushing and bleeding, into your directory. You felt safe. You were mine. You gave me a secret room within which to be brave.

To be brave now, I've got to open you up. Slowly, and with appropriate caution. I was right that the world is not the place in which you do your good thinking.

But you are too beautiful to keep to myself. If I hoard you, I will neglect you.

I am loved, and you will be loved.

Every time I write something in you, I retreat behind closed doors. By default, each new plant arrives, shivering, into the private toplevel where you and I are there and little else is there.

But lately, I've felt the excitement of impending transplantation – of tending to something that will soon be taken out, just to see a little more sun.

I have intentions for you. I love you dearly, as I love everything I make for myself out of necessity, because I feel the love that was put into you, the inalienable desire for survival in your structure and in your habituated presence in my fingers. In your history I see mine. We are not the same but a part of me is with you.

I will not let you die of neglect.

I believe, one day, possibly quite soon, you will be terrifying. We will learn how to channel our lightning together.

Sincerely, Your Writer.