on collecting and saving the past
Part 1: Traveling
Recently, at 10 pm I went through all 8,000 photos on my phone, a conglomeration of memes, screenshotted messages, and photoshoots. My iphone X was given to me the summer of 2018, after my original phone shit itself during summer school. The old phone had overheated in the sun and then completely burst, leaving me off the grid for two weeks until my mom shipped me her phone (the X). Four years later, the 8,000 photos had culminated memories of senior year grad parties to college freshman year February breaks to pandemic-era memes.
I recently started thinking about storage because of two catalysts- one because of my mac telling me I had 3 GB left every other day, leading me to frantically figure out what to cut. The other when upgrading my iphone X and transferring my data - the store manager telling me to use 256 GB because I had already spent 128 GB, a decent half on videos, images, and iMessage texts. It had me thinking, if I used my phone for four more years, then would I have to upgrade to 528 GB? Or, would I have to start using the cloud, and join the 1 TB waiting for me on some computer in a cold whirring room in the middle of nowhere. How much data was my entire life? 2TB? 4? And who were those memories for - my kids? My kid’s kids? I hardly had any photos from my family’s distant past, I don’t know what my grandfather’s life was very much like at all, and I’m not sure how much one would care about mine a century from now.
It recently popped into my head that all these recordings, all these google hangout messages and messenger conversations, these screenshots and image bursts essentially could equate to the most low-fidelity version of traveling back in time. Not in a visceral way where you could literally be there, reliving the moment through your eyes and hearing those words, but in a preserved way. I had done it once before when in China after senior year and faced with fraying connections with someone I cared about, had guiltily reminisced in our old messages where we talked more frequently. I don’t remember much of it, or how I felt, or why I did it in that wave of loneliness but it was as if I had gone back in time. I had the acute power to go back, to remember when I told my first crush in eighth grade over google chat my affection was like a simmering bowl of soup, something in the background of my head. But I also could remember all the terrible times as well, messages that hurt like a punch in the gut, hurt so much I never wanted to read them again.
I figured, much like the clothes I had dropped off at Plato’s closet that turned out to be worth 6 dollars, remembering wasn’t worth that much at all. It would be good to do a spring cleaning of my images and get rid of duplicates and old memes, I had time anyways. I was already home for a few days which it gave me a vague sense of the endlessness and infinity of time. Home had always had that feeling, since returning for the fourth summer in a row as if I was stuck in an endless time loop, doing the same things with the same inside jokes. As if I had left an 18-year-old and had returned in the same state, looping my fingers through the hazy mirage of adulthood and my identity no longer tied to my home. Even with friends more seriously thumbtacking the cities they were going to live in, our futures all scattered like stars across the US, the locations forming a cryptic constellation, it was always okay to ruminate and fester in the cradling monotony of suburbia.
Part 2: Discarding
It was strange going through my photos. At first, it was easy, looking through the hundreds and hundreds of photos from photoshoots and the endless duplicates. Especially when giving it to a guy friend who didn’t care much at all and finger down on the camera, added four hundred photos in one sitting. But as I went further down I saw hints of my past selves. Hints of who I was in the memes I saved, the Tumblr and blog quotes I screenshotted, and even the homework answers I took from high school whiteboards. It started to dawn on me that even the mundane bits of memory I was scared to delete. Even if my storage was a ticking time bomb, even if some people and faces and memories and notes didn’t matter so much to me before, it felt like I was saying goodbye to a different me, a different person who was unmarred by the sadness that had come or was to come. As if I was tossing it all into the digital sea.
There was a moment of hesitation. I was looking through photos with someone who had turned into an acquaintance, who at the time I held onto dear life. I saw the me that so desperately believed that this was who I was going to grow old with and introduce my children to because that was the easiest thing to do when you don’t know what else you want. I wanted to forget the reality of impermanence but I couldn’t let go, because that girl in the photos was also me.
Part 3: Recording
Technology has made it impossible to forget. Even when my first phone hit the fan and sent years of middle school memories into the void, I still had my nine year old diary that contained my thoughts from third to twelfth grade. I had my crusty Dell computer that contained my anime scribbles and screenshots and occasional photos I imported. I had an overflowing, fistful of memories that I didn’t know what to do with.
People say reflection and remembering are important, and I partially agree. It helps me realize my growth, and how far I’ve come since the worst of it. But also in the rut of worst, it drags me down further, back to times when things were better and I didn’t feel awful.
Yet, I won’t always have time to go through old photos, the world moves too fast to warrant remembering. And nowadays a part of me is more inclined to forget. There’s a part of me that wants to take my fistful of memories and toss them into the sun. I don’t want to remember anymore, let me build a time capsule of select things and throw them away. Let me archive my life so it's meticulously remembered the way I want it to be for my future selves. I want to record myself in a way that every second remembering isn’t one plagued with a sense of loss of innocence, no, I don’t want to remember like that. I don’t want to remember every second of my life and cling onto moments in a clenched grip. I want to remember brief respites of joy and sadness but not have it ooze into a meaningless soup of forgotten thoughts.