icon

I have this thing that has for years been my icon for the single most formative experience in my life. It is so significant that I left no room for it to be less significant to anyone else (not that I was aware of this). I was then so distressed to find the other day, that it had vanished from the internet--and I'm good at searching, too. It has been awhile since I sought it, but I remember it used to have a substantial presence online. Even after a couple of hours looking (the obsessive point it reaches when there seems a pending identity crisis), I found no helpful results.

I wanted to post something about my thing on here and provide a handy link, but everyone knows if Google can't find it, it must not exist.

How can this be? Where is the corporate urge to preserve something so precious? Why can't I find it and why doesn't anyone else care enough to keep it around?

Defeating the most exhaustive search mechanism we've ever really known feels like anything BUT victory.

Moving on in life means things aren't "there anymore." I get that. The loss of it, though, even in the cyberform is big. What a wave of isolation comes from realizing that my precious icon can no longer serve as a common referent--and that maybe it didn't even in the first place.