Recursive Words

It’s 10am on Sunday morning, and the house is unexpectedly quiet – which makes me wonder what kind of shit-show is about to unfold.

The bathroom renovation is still a skeletal mess of exposed pipes and broken promises, and the kids are still holed up somewhere or other scrolling a thousand TikToks.

A few weeks ago I wrote about us all being like leaves on a river – that we cross each other’s paths, swirl around the same eddies for a while, and then the current – be it work, family, or just the sheer, exhausting inertia of getting through a Tuesday – pulls us apart once again. We don’t lose or forget each other exactly – we’re just busy being run over by whatever has come around the next bend.

Well… today I think I’ve somehow paddled my way back into the main part of the river.

It started with a stray notification from a social network I haven’t properly lived in for years. One of those “Look who’s back” or “You have 412 unread memories” pings that usually just make me feel old and slightly guilty. But instead of hitting ‘clear,’ in a moment of idiocy I followed the breadcrumbs.

Logging back into old spaces feels like walking into a pub I used to frequent in younger years. The decor is different, the music is weirder, and you’re not entirely sure where the toilets are anymore, but then you see a face across the room, or the corner where that thing happened, and suddenly you’re home again.

I’ve spent so much time lately feeling like I was stuck in the weeds—hiding away from the “social internet” because it felt like a shouting match I didn’t want to win. I’d retreated into my own little safe backwater.

But as I scrolled through the updates of people I used to talk to every day—people who saw me through the early days of blogging—I realised the river is still there. It’s wider than I remember, and definitely more turbulent, but the people who mattered? They’re still there.

Clicking like on posts written by people you’ve not seen for years feels like nodding towards them across a busy room. “You’re still here?” “Still here.” It turns out, we’re all fighting the same idiocy, the same chaos, and the same creeping suspicion that we’re the only ones who haven’t figured out how the world works yet.

I’ve been away for far too long, convinced that the gap between us had grown too wide to bridge. But the internet, for all its idiocy and apathy, has this funny way of bending space. You can be gone for years, and the moment you post a fragment of thought, it’s like you never left.

It feels good to be back in the deep water. If you’re out there, still drifting along the same bend of the river I just re-joined: hi. It’s been a while.

Anyway.

I should probably stop before this turns into a manifesto. I think there’s some cold pizza in the kitchen, and frankly, pizza solves most things.

See you on the next bend.