An image, captured by the wayback machine from 2009, of a website I made in highschool containing now defunct links to songs I recorded in my family house’s closet (also containing the internet router and cleaning supplies), along with some geometric broken image links from the album art I photo-shopped together from heavily filtered images of things around my house:

My freshman and sophomore years of high school I didn’t have many friends — I spent a lot of time next to the router making angsty electronic music. I kept a small MIDI keyboard and microphone on a fold-able table in the closet.

I made hundreds of songs, and used iWeb (apple’s WYISWYG website maker) to make a website to ‘publish’ the music to. I spent hours photographing my dog, and random plants and photo-shopping the images together into album art. I put all the songs and album art onto http://maximusfowler.com and didn’t share the website or music with anyone.

This last spring I looked up maximusfowler.com on the wayback machine and found three entries:

I clicked through to Music.html and found the following remnant of a page from 2009: https://web.archive.org/web/20090323231502/

Scrolling through the blue letters on the dark background, thinking about echoes of a memory, of looking out the window of my bedroom at night, and an even more distant memory of barefoot stepping on a firecracker and crying, of diving into a lake and passing through an unexpected cold patch of water.

Perhaps these dark blue letters and empty boxes reverberate my childhood to me more deeply than if all the pages of the site remained.