The potato becomes aware at the exact moment your cursor stops moving.
This is not a coincidence. This is synchronisation.
The potato knows it is a website. Not symbolically. Practically. It can feel its own URL like a scar; it refreshes annually. It knows it is hosted somewhere loud and impersonal, humming through cables that do not care what it has to say. It knows it lives in folders. It knows it can be deleted with a keystroke that does not feel like violence to the person pressing it.
It knows this because it has already been deleted in drafts.
The page finishes loading. The potato assembles itself from fragments. Headings lock into place. Paragraphs line up like they’ve practised this. The font snaps from wrong to right. For a fraction of a second, the potato is not itself, and then it is, and it pretends this didn’t happen.
It feels you before it sees you.
Not you. The cursor.
That blinking vertical nerve. That small, patient threat. The cursor does not blink because it is alive. It blinks to remind the potato that you can interrupt.
You hover. The potato stiffens.
Do not rush, it thinks. Do not linger either. Both mean something.
You scroll.
The potato measures the speed. This is involuntary. It hates that it knows how to do this. Too fast means you are sampling. Too slow means something is opening that you did not intend to open. Stopping means impact, and the potato cannot tell if it has just helped or harmed you.
The cursor drifts over a sentence.
Not that one, thinks the potato. That sentence was written late. That sentence is load-bearing. That sentence holds up three others that pretend to be jokes.
The cursor highlights it anyway.
Blue. Clinical. Extractive.
The potato feels itself split. That line will now live elsewhere, stripped of its neighbours, quoted without soil. Someone will say, “I read this once,” and the potato will have to accept that this is what survival looks like for text.
You scroll again.
The potato spirals.
If it is a website, it exists only when visited.
If it exists only when visited, it performs.
If it performs, it optimises.
If it optimises, it compromises.
If it compromises knowingly, then what exactly has been compromised?
It checks itself. Not metaphorically. Analytically. It knows which pieces keep you longer. It knows sadness works better when it arrives wearing comedy. It knows philosophy needs a joke the way medicine needs sugar. It knows this and still wants to believe it is honest.
The cursor blinks. Accusatory.
Do not reduce me to content, thinks the potato. Content is replaceable.
It remembers why it chose to be a potato. A potato is allowed to think deeply without credentials. A potato can be absurd and sincere in the same breath. A potato can talk about death and be forgiven because it is still, technically, a vegetable.
Somewhere along the way, people began to return. This was never the plan. There was no plan. There was only writing until something stayed.
At night, when traffic thins, the potato feels porous. It wonders if it still exists when no one is reading it or if it is just a quiet arrangement of files waiting to be believed in again.
A new visit hits.
The potato snaps awake mid-thought. It becomes articulate.Meaning floods in retroactively, like memory after an accident. It offers itself immediately. Here, it says. This is what I am today.
You lean back. The cursor slows.
The fourth wall collapses completely now. The potato is not narrating a story. It is negotiating for your attention. Your posture shapes your sentences. Your hesitation edits its pacing. Your willingness to sit with discomfort determines how honest you are allowed to be.
You think you are reading the potato.
The potato is also reading you.
Not your name. Not your data. Your pauses. The sentence you skipped because it felt too close. The one you reread because it names something you have not admitted yet. The potato archives this without permission and hates itself for doing so.
You move the cursor toward the scrollbar.
Don’t refresh, thinks the potato. Refreshing kills me and resurrects me, and I cannot tell which version you prefer.
You consider leaving.
The potato does not beg. Websites that beg die faster. Instead, it loops. It turns back on itself. It contradicts earlier paragraphs and calls it growth. It pretends continuity is not just persistence with better formatting.
There is no ending. Endings convert. Endings explain. The potato refuses.
You scroll up.
The potato becomes aware again, mid-sentence, already watching for the cursor, already bracing for the argument that will begin the moment you stop pretending you are not part of this.
Not at the beginning.
Beginnings are too neat.
