Site History and Related Catharsis

History: back in the day (read: several years ago) I had a machine on the server rack at the office of the company I worked for. That machine was hyouden (means “field of infinite snow” in Japanese), and its domain was hyouden.net. The box sat on a nice business T1 and ran OpenBSD, and for a time hosted this very domain as well as hyouden. But hyouden, at the time, was my web pride and joy.

I was on the “first wave” of blogging. I didn’t think of it as part of a movement when I signed up for Blogger in their early months, just an easier way to update the news on my site. I quickly got bored of “blogging,” such as I was doing it, and wanted something more community-oriented. Knowing absolutely zero PHP I hacked and stapled together a rudimentary message board of sorts. I decked the site out in old skool ASCII and teletext type and let people fire away, not even bothering to have accounts or passwords. It was a playground for my friends and I, our own private ongoing absurd conversation, right out in public. It was a riot.

You can see one of the earlier iterations of the site here, after it had escaped into the clutches of Google and other search spiders; I prided myself on how long it took for Google to ever find the domain, consciously never linking it from this frequently-indexed site. You’ll note some familiar names to regular readers of this blog: 5dots, jonbro, and so forth. Conversation was funny and inane, the design was simple, and it gave my mates and I all something to do when bored in computer lab classes. It was a great way for me to keep up with the friends I had left behind at my first high school.

By the next Archive.org snapshot you can see that the site did a little bit more. Then, as now, we were into the DC/Baltimore rave scene, so upcoming events were listed at the top of page. I finally added a rudimentary account system, and the sarcastic quotes at the top of the page and signature “we don’t want to hear what you have to say” posting disclaimer was gone. The site lasted in that format for barely weeks, however, as shifts in our silly high school social circle turned the formerly carefree discussion on the site to mildly hostile.

The last form the site took before becoming a redirect and ultimately discontinued was as a dual blog for my then-girlfriend and I. My interest in blogging piqued again, however, I went back to writing my own personal blog, and here we are. But that last iteration of hyouden brings us to my point.

Catharsis: I always have to learn things the hard way. A great friend who’s been a godsend throughout the tumultuous eight(!) months since my breakup with my longtime girlfriend had delicately suggested at intervals when I felt I had moved on that perhaps this wasn’t the case, that I had yet to really understand and confront the relationship’s end. The only way to do this, of course, is with the other person involved in that relationship. But my utter terror of communication with my ex, or even hearing about her secondhand, had kept me from doing what I needed to do in any substantive way.

So to get an IM from her the other night was the usual terrifying, cold-chills-everywhere experience, but one I decided to work through. We talked about the usual where-are-you-now life details, and then about the circumstances of the end of the relationship. I had the assumptions and questions I had only guessed at during sleepless nights validated, and though far from resolving to be friends or even semi-frequent corresponders, the whole experience left me confident enough to cope with a very periodic check-up IM. It all seems terribly mundane, I’m sure, but it’s opened my world up unfathomably.

The heartbroken songs that had emerged in my head now seem foolish, as does much of time I’ve spent this three-quarter year since we’ve split turning myself over a spit of my own making. After that conversation I could feel a weight lifted from me as I drifted off to a night of dreams that didn’t wake me gasping for breath and sweating cold bullets.

I can, now, go back and see her name on these web pages I share with you without feeling my heart lurch for cover in my stomach. I can simply remember memories through the comforting lens of time, distance, and personal progress, rather than reliving them in aching detail. I can move on, is what I’m saying, and that’s anything but mundane to me.

I have to learn things the hard way. But if you have the gift of taking advice (and it is a gift), then take this: don’t hesitate to confront what keeps you up at night. I was a fool and hypocrite for taking a confrontational tact in most realms of my life while not applying it to what I needed to most.

But now that I finally have, it’s a whole new day.