Eclipse

Today I want to tell you why I keep returning to one word, even after all these years.

Today I want to tell you about Eclipse.

Not the astronomical definition. I know what an eclipse is. One body moves in front of another, light is interrupted, shadows fall where they normally would not, and for a few minutes everybody looks upward because something familiar has suddenly changed.

I mean my Eclipse.

People have seen the word around me for years. In names, photographs, pages, little signatures left at the bottom of things I write. Sometimes directly, sometimes hidden inside something else. Eventually it became so normal that I stopped thinking about how strange it might look from the outside.

Why Eclipse?

The answer is not because I like darkness.

That would be too easy.

I have always been much more interested in light.

Especially what happens to it when something gets in the way.

An eclipse does not destroy the sun. That is the first thing people forget. The light is still there. Nothing has stopped existing. For a moment, the position of things changes, and because of that, you see them differently.

I think I understood that before I knew how to explain it.

There have always been parts of me that were easier to show than others. The organized parts. The things I could put into folders, categories, playlists, photographs, pages, code. I have always liked giving things a structure. If something could be named, sorted, archived or understood, I felt more comfortable with it.

Then there were the other parts.

The things that did not fit neatly anywhere.

A memory that suddenly returned because of a song. A photograph I could not delete even though it meant nothing to anyone else. A sentence I wrote at two in the morning and understood only years later. The strange feeling of missing a version of myself that technically still existed.

Those things were harder to classify.

So I kept them.

I suppose that is where Eclipse began.

Not as a name.

As a place.

Years later, when the internet became less like somewhere I visited and more like somewhere I actually lived, I started leaving pieces of myself there.

Music first. Images. Words. Little fragments of thought. Then pages, archives, websites, things I built and rebuilt because the first version was never quite right.

I changed things constantly.

Fonts. Colours. Layouts. Names.

Especially names.

A name on the internet is a strange thing. At first it feels temporary. You type something into a box because the website refuses to let you continue without it. You assume you can always choose another one later.

Then one day somebody calls you by it.

And suddenly it belongs to you.

Eclixar became that kind of name.

At some point it stopped feeling like a username and started feeling like a room I had built around myself. Everything could go there: science beside poetry, Linux beside fashion, photographs beside mathematics, music beside old diary entries. Things that would normally be placed in completely different rooms could exist together without having to explain themselves.

That mattered to me.

Because I have never understood why a person is supposed to make perfect sense from the outside.

I can spend an hour fixing one tiny technical problem and then become completely distracted by the way sunlight falls across a wall. I can care about a line of code and a line in a book with almost the same intensity. I can want evidence, structure and precision and still keep things simply because they are beautiful.

For a long time I thought those sides contradicted each other.

They do not.

They overlap.

Like an eclipse.

That was when the word began to mean something different to me.

An eclipse is not one thing defeating another. The moon does not conquer the sun. Darkness does not win. Light does not lose.

Two things simply occupy the same line for a moment.

And because they do, something rare appears.

I liked that.

I still do.

Maybe that is also why I never wanted Eclixar to represent only one version of me. It was never supposed to be just a blog, or photographs, or music, or code, or a diary.

It was the place where all of those versions could cross.

The visible one.

The private one.

The logical one.

The sentimental one I occasionally pretend is not there.

All of them.

There is another thing about eclipses that I love.

They pass.

That sounds obvious, but it matters.

If you stand outside during a solar eclipse, there is a moment when the world becomes unfamiliar. The temperature changes. The light looks wrong. Shadows behave differently. For a few minutes, something enormous seems to have happened.

And then the light returns.

Not because the darkness was defeated.

Because everything kept moving.

I think about that more often than I admit.

There have been periods of my life when I have wanted to freeze things exactly as they were. A room. A person. A website. A photograph. A version of myself. As though preserving something perfectly could stop time from touching it.

It never works.

Things move anyway.

People change. Computers die. Websites disappear. Links break. Music that once sounded new becomes attached to memories. Photographs slowly become evidence that a particular afternoon really happened.

Even we become archives of ourselves.

Maybe that is why I keep so much.

Not because I expect to live in the past.

Because I like proof that it existed.

Sometimes I open an old folder and find something I had completely forgotten. A picture. A sentence. A design I would never make now. For a few seconds I can remember exactly who I was when I created it.

Then I close the folder and return to who I am now.

That, too, feels like an eclipse.

One version passing briefly in front of another.

Neither disappears.

They simply overlap.

So when I call myself Eclipse, I am not referring to darkness.

I am referring to that overlap.

To the part of me that can stand between what I was and what I am becoming without needing to choose one of them.

To the fact that something can be hidden without being gone.

To light that continues even when you cannot see all of it.

And Eclixar?

Eclixar is what happened when that idea needed somewhere to live.

A name became a place. The place became an archive. The archive slowly became a kind of map.

Not a perfect one.

There are missing pieces. Wrong turns. Things I would rewrite. Things I would never touch because changing them would destroy the person who originally made them.

But they are all mine.

Sometimes, at the end of something I write, I leave the same words:

Remember me, Eclipse.

I used to think they sounded like a goodbye.

I do not anymore.

Now they sound more like an instruction.

Not remember me when I am gone.

Remember all of me.

Even the parts temporarily hidden from the light.