First of all - for those who aren’t aware of The Wayback Machine, it’s an archive of over 1 trillion web pages on the internet, whether they still exist or not. I think you can search back to maybe 2004 or something like that. Could be earlier maybe, not sure.

Anyway, I was playing around with it last night when suddenly I remembered a very, very special website that I haven’t seen since I was maybe 12-14 years old. It was a website my biological dad made for me.

My mom and I left my dad when I was 4 years old. Their relationship was incredibly toxic. None of that toxicity was ever directed at me, just my mom. Nowadays all is forgiven and they are on good terms, but at that time my mom never really spoke about my dad to me, and she made it so he wouldn’t be allowed to see me again until I was 18 years old.

Around my 12th birthday she finally decided to allow him to send me gifts, but she decided not to tell me they were from him.

One of those gifts was a diary with a butterfly on the front. I was an avid journaller as a kid and I was so excited to receive this beautiful diary. I immediately took it upstairs to my room to write in it, and quickly discovered a little message written on the inside back cover. It was addressed to me, from my dad. He said how much he missed me, how he thought of me every day and that his biggest regret in life was losing me. At the end of the note he said he’d made a website just for me and he wrote out the url.

That night I snuck down to the family computer after everyone had gone to bed, and I typed in the URL.

What came up just absolutely floored me. The website was filled with photos of my childhood id never seen, photos of my dad and his life that I’d never seen either… and pages and pages of notes and letters and poems he both wrote and collected for me over the years. I’d had no idea he even thought of me at all up until that point. I felt so incredibly special and so deeply loved. That moment was genuinely life altering for me.

So last night when I was exploring the Wayback machine, I suddenly remembered that special website, which has not existed for many years. I typed in the URL, and wouldn’t you know it? There it was. That life altering offering of love from my dad from all those years ago. The poems he wrote and collected for me. The letters he wrote me throughout my childhood.

I can’t even express how full my heart feels after finding that again.