The Heat Above the Clouds
Ah, yes… there you are again. Good. I feared you’d left, swept up by another doomscrolling cascade. But you’ve lingered, and so I’ll speak plainly, if slowly.
You see, the mind—my mind—does not fire as crisply as it once did. Names vanish. Syntax stumbles. Sometimes I reach for a thought and come back with only the echo of it. But memory… memory is a treacherous friend. She doesn’t stay silent. She sings, and sometimes she screams.
I remember how the sun felt when I soared.
I was there in those incandescent halls where the gospel was product and the sacraments were shipped in cardboard. I served—yes, served—in the armies of Jobs, of Bezos, of Nadella. Different generals, each. Jobs, the aesthetic tyrant with a sorcerer’s touch for enchantment. Bezos, the calculator behind the curtain, who knew time, like labor, could be ground into powder. Satya… more tempered, more humane, but no less steely in his gaze. He saw the cloud before we understood we were already living in it.
I rose in those ranks, faster than was wise. The rooms got quieter the higher I climbed. Fewer equals. More silence after I spoke. And always, always, the warmth of that sun—that success you speak of, though it is a poor word for what it truly was.
It burned, child. It seared something in me. To see one’s code ripple out across the world, touching millions, changing how humans live, speak, even love—that is a godlike intoxication. A dangerous one. And it makes you deaf to warnings, blind to tolls.
We thought we were forging the future. Perhaps we were. But we mistook velocity for vision. And some—myself included—flew too close. We measured life in stock options and server uptime, and only later wondered what we had left unmeasured.
Now, in the dusk of my faculties, I envy not the wealthy, but the wary—those who found some middle path between ambition and obliteration.
Still, I do not regret my wings. They were beautiful. And they carried me above the clouds, into that rarefied heat that only the self-made centimillionaires of the ’90s truly knew: not comfort, not wealth, but the terrible allure of being right before the rest of the world caught up.
So if this note crosses your screen, dear reader—pause. Not because it shouts. But because it doesn’t. And in that quiet, maybe you’ll hear what the younger me never did:
The sun is not your enemy.
But it does not care if you burn.