The Stone

The 21st of July, 2025

You are the stone, firmly planted to the earth. You are unchanging, unshakable. Countless moons rise and wane above you. Warm summer rain wets your face. The cold of winter reaches out its chilly fingers to touch your rocky surface. You are unmoved, but the years have weathered you. You are the stone.

Perhaps it’s a fault, but I have always been the stone, set in my ways and unchanged by the turning of the seasons and the passing of years. In the last few years, I’ve made efforts to change and be more malleable. Somehow, my distant idealized form is the ocean: flowing, ever changing, but also the comfort in the consistency of the tide.

In the summer of 2006, on vacation with my family at the beach, my mother bought me a cheap little steel ring at one of those beach shops. I’ve worn this ring every single day since that day in 2006. Even 19 years later, I’m wearing it now as I type this up. I’ll probably be buried wearing this ring. This is an example of what I mean when I say I have a bit of the DNA of the stone within me.

This aspect of my personhood carries over to other areas of my life (but none that are harmful. Worry not, dear reader.)

I won’t discuss too much of the specifics of this for fear that doing so will shift the tide too much, but in late 2014, I found myself with few online friends. It was a lonely time for me. During this time, I turned to a small forum group’s weekly free-chat sections for some company. As an aside, yes, this was quite a while ago, before Discord. Anyways, after some time, many of the forum members were actively promoting an IRC channel. It took me a bit to warm up to the idea. Installing IRC software and learning how to use it was a bit of a hurdle for 2014 Ocean, and so I put it off. However, in 2015, in my online loneliness and on summer break from college, I finally caved.

Instantly, I loved this little IRC channel. It was thriving in this era, and people were always coming and going, but there was a core central group of people who were regulars; they would become some of my closest friends. We spent those warm summer days together peacefully, and this carried on for many years.

Of course, being 2015, we had a Minecraft server; it was a little place called Nekonia hosted on an old laptop in a friend’s closet, but we did so many other things too. In those distant days, every Friday night, we’d hop onto a service, which I’ve woefully forgotten the name of, and queue up songs for each other to listen to, everyone getting a turn. We called these Miku nights because we’d mainly play vocaloid music, but it became a general music thing after the first few. It was quite enjoyable. I could go on and on listing the great many things we did together, but you get the idea. D&D, gaming, browsing the web together, watching anime. The point is that it was a community and a safe little place I could call my home online. So many wonderful people on this little IRC channel that enriched my life, even when I wasn’t online.

And of course, as you know from reading the beginning of this blog post… Every day, I’d come onto this sacred place seeking the companionship of my cherished friends, and each day I’d be greeted warmly by them. This has continued on for the 10 years now that I’ve been on, but slowly, new people stopped coming to our sacred home. Slowly, the regulars began to log off once and then forever, and now only I and a few others remain. The halls, which once reverberated with the joyous laughter of many, now quiet.

The stone sits in place, but it still sees the rain and wind.
The stone may be unmoving, but the elements change it.
Erode its surface.
Time may have shifted us away from each other.
But
Thank you,
And
I love you!
You'll be a part of me
Always,
now and forever.

Because I am the stone.