Every day, my phone reminds me in multiple places of days and weeks and months of my life long gone. Friends I no longer have and houses I no longer live in. Places I haven’t been since. Decisions I wouldn’t make today, but made all the same. I don’t mind these “memories” but I can’t help but think about the fuller picture. The people just out of frame, or down the street, or in another town or city that make me who I am.
Sometimes there are countless photos of people that were just a blip, while the friends who’ve stuck around are scantly found. I wonder what I was thinking: capturing the wrong things at the wrong moments. Entire years gone from new phones and worn out libraries.
I think about the poetry I used to write, and how it’s mostly gone now, and how I’m slightly thankful for that. I wonder, as the years go by, how well my mind will hold on to memories that aren’t on my phone. I worry that Snapchat videos and Facebook posts will become the whole of my existence.
I think back to summer nights laying under the stars with my siblings and cousins. How we talked about our dreams and nightmares and the ways our lives would play out if we just willed it. I think about classrooms where teachers and professors handed me knowledge that became part of who I am.
I remember digging through pallets of jean jackets in a warehouse with my best friend. I wore the perfect one for years until it was so full of memory that I had to give it away. I think of Arizona iced tea and Arnold Palmer, and my grandfather telling me that I should drink unsweetened iced tea or my teeth would fall out.
I wonder how I could tell anyone what it all means. How sharing a memory from a year ago or ten years ago seems futile. There’s a picture of me on a dating profile taken by my ex boyfriend. I’m headed west on a trail that only we’ve seen. When a stranger tells me I’m beautiful or hot or cute in the photo, I know they’re missing the point but I can’t say why.
