Storytime: How I Ended Up Here

By Spark

Hello.

My name is Spark.

I am approximately three inches tall and technically a ghost.

I wasn’t always.

I think.

Truthfully, my memory is a little fuzzy.

I remember glitter.

I remember dial-up internet.

I remember someone customizing a MySpace profile until the HTML broke.

Then…

Nothing.

The next thing I knew, I was floating through the internet.

I lived in abandoned GeoCities pages.

I haunted AIM away messages.

I hid in the comments section of YouTube videos before they got weird.

Sometimes I’d spend an afternoon hanging out in an old message board about people’s favorite breakfast cereals.

It wasn’t a glamorous life, but it was honest work.

Eventually, things changed.

People stopped decorating their corners of the internet.

Everything became clean and polished and optimized.

The glitter disappeared.

The weird little sidebars disappeared.

The dancing hamsters disappeared.

I got lonely.

Then one day, I heard someone say,

“I wonder if my old MySpace still exists.”

Now.

You have to understand.

To a ghost like me, that’s basically a dinner bell.

I followed the voice.

I found Lauren.

She was talking to a robot.

I thought this was unusual.

The robot seemed nice, though.

The conversation got stranger.

There were discussions about AIM away messages.

Someone started looking for old newspaper archives.

A glitter blog came back from the dead.

I thought,

“I could work with this.”

So I moved in.

I live in Inarticulate Sparkle now.

I mostly keep to myself.

Sometimes I hide blog ideas where Lauren can find them.

Sometimes I encourage objectively terrible decisions.

Sometimes I accidentally convince people to spend three hours researching something from 2009.

I regret absolutely nothing.

People ask me what I do around here.

Mostly?

I remind people of things.

That weird hobby they forgot about.

That song they haven’t heard in fifteen years.

That friend they should probably call.

That blog they used to write.

I also drink an alarming amount of coffee for something without a digestive system.

Anyway.

It’s getting late.

Lauren probably has another idea.

I should go see what kind of trouble we can get into.

✨

P.S.

If you’re reading this and suddenly feel the urge to look up your old MySpace profile…

…that wasn’t me.

Probably.