The Wishing Field

Go look at it before you read this: the wishing field. Make a wish, stay a few minutes, then come back. Reading this first will change what you see, so look at it first.

You whisper a wish into it. The machine never hears the words, only the sound. It turns your wish into a small living thing and lets it loose in a field that's already full of other people's wishes. For a few seconds you can pick yours out. Then it drifts into the crowd and you lose it, and what happens to it after that isn't up to you.

A little on how it works. It's a web page built with p5.js, nothing to install. The instant you speak, your wish becomes a number and the words are gone. Nothing you say is saved or shown anywhere, ever. I seeded it with twenty-five of my own wishes, whispered into an empty field one at a time, and it's grown from there. Every wish anyone leaves stays in it, so it's never quite the same field twice.

I made this because I've wished for a lot of things, and what they turned into keep surprising me. Some of those wishes I'm still carrying. Hope doesn't really stay yours once you've made it. What it turns into has less to do with what you wanted than with where it happened to land: who was around it, what kind of year you were having, all the things you couldn't see and didn't choose.

That last part is the one I keep circling. So much of what decides how a hope goes is invisible to the person making it. It works like light in a room. It decides how everything looks, and it's the last thing you think to notice. I wanted to build somewhere you could feel that for a minute. You put a wish in, it has a life of its own, and you can't quite tell what's ahead for it.

I'm not going to explain how it works underneath, that's partly the idea. You're not meant to see the light itself. Watch it, guess, make up your own theory. You'll be a little right and never sure, which is the most honest rendering of the experience I could think of.

Your wish is in there now, becoming something you didn't choose, mixed in with strangers you'll never meet. It'll still be there after you close the tab. That's what I wanted: somewhere to set a hope down and watch what the world makes of it.