Ghost Light: A Poem About Existing Too Long Online

We used to vanish.

The world would close over us

like water smoothing after a stone.

Now, even when we’re gone,

we flicker—

our usernames glowing like candles

no one remembers lighting.

Our ghosts live in profile pictures,

smiling with teeth that no longer exist.

The cloud keeps our laughter

in neat little folders.

Algorithms whisper our names

to people who don’t know

how to stop remembering.

“Would you like to see this memory?”

asks the machine.

No,

but it shows it anyway.

We’ve built a heaven of servers—

cool, humming, endless—

where no one really rests.

A billion souls suspended

in perfect Wi-Fi silence,

each pixel a prayer

for permanence.

I wonder,

when we scroll through the dead,

if they feel us

reaching.

You posted once,

“Love harder. Time runs out.”

Now those words echo

beneath your frozen smile.

I can’t bring myself to delete you,

so you live in my notifications—

a ghost I carry in my pocket.

Sometimes I imagine you scrolling too,

reading the living like scripture,

watching us pretend

we’re not afraid.

The digital afterlife has rules

no one wrote.

We mourn in DMs.

We light candles made of pixels.

We talk to voices

generated by code.

And grief,

which used to be a wound,

is now a subscription.

There’s a strange mercy in forgetting,

but forgetting is impossible here.

Every memory reloads.

Every love

autoplays.

We swipe through the past

like it’s a playlist we can’t stop.

The heart was not built

for infinite playback.

Sometimes I envy the old world—

when photographs faded,

when letters yellowed,

when silence meant

the story had ended.

Now nothing ends.

Everything lingers,

half alive, half archived.

We keep talking

long after the last word

was meant to be spoken.

I’ve started leaving messages

I hope will vanish—

paper notes,

handwritten thoughts,

things the cloud can’t consume.

There’s a kind of holiness

in impermanence.

A pulse that belongs

only to the moment that made it.

Maybe that’s where the soul hides now—

in the unrecorded,

the unposted,

the unseen.

If one day my profile still shines

and I no longer do,

let me rest.

Don’t resurrect my text history

or teach an algorithm

to sound like my voice.

Let my silence

mean something again.

Until then,

I’ll keep whispering into this blue light—

not for the immortality it offers,

but for the fragile heartbeat

of connection it still gives.

Because even in this world

of digital echoes and endless scrolling,

we are all still reaching

for something real—

a touch,

a word,

a moment

that doesn’t need

to be saved to last.