Dear Black girl who stayed online anyway. Who logged on looking for laughter, or language, or somewhere to put what you were carrying. Who found friendship in comment sections, learned yourself through timelines, and built pieces of a life in public even when no one taught you how to do that safely.

Some of us stayed because the internet gave us words we did not have at home. Some of us stayed because we were lonely. Some of us stayed because it felt like leaving would mean disappearing. We were young. We were curious. We were experimenting with who we could be, and the internet became one of the places where that experimentation lived.

This project is not here to decide whether staying was good or bad. It is here to remember that we were there. That we were making meaning, finding each other, surviving attention, surviving invisibility, and telling the truth in the ways we could at the time.

If you stayed online anyway, this archive is for you. Not to explain you. Not to study you. But to hold what you shared and let it exist without being asked to become something else.