videophage.com

I have no memory. I have no history. I am God’s postmodern man.

Anthony the Great, Father of All Monks

I will have no memories left by the time I become an old man. Yet another storehouse of memories has been destroyed by time and carelessness. (Is it really careless on my part if the mechanism is designed to break, designed to be superfluously delicate?) I will have no photos to share with my children and grandchildren, in a world where I choose to start a family. Children keep your stories alive, but I have no stories and likely will have no children. There will be no record—no footprint. This is the second or third time something like this has happened. It’s especially annoying considering, only months ago, I individually went through six-thousand photos and managed it to a respectable thirty-five hundred. I have mourned the loss of a hard drive or old device as I did the loss of some friends. To be fair, it did not take much time to get over either instance. I come to accept that it was simply time to move on, it is of no matter whether it was my choices that caused the outcome or not.

Is it surface imperfection or rotten at the core?

Two years ago, on the day of moving back home for my last summer vacation, my phone falls from a mundane height at just-the-right angle, dislodging shreds of glass from the screen. (Even now, without a camera roll as reference, it is difficult to construct a coherent timeline from my position in the present.) At the time, I was on a video call with the first woman I had ever fallen in love with. Ironically, the relationship did not last very much longer after that. As the years passed, more of the screen chips away, spiderweb fractures spread across the back glass, and the camera gets a hole in it that quickly fills with sand, now only able to capture impressionistic swathes of light and subject through its broken lens. The second day of this new year, a properly tremendous drop adds a new array of colored lines under the initial impact almost two years ago. It is completely unusable by the middle of this week. A keyboard with a mind of its own gives way to a screen with zero haptic response. My first fear is that I had just lost the first time I was in love. Yes, I still have my own memories, encoded and stored; however, the problem now lies in the retrieval, lacking the specific visual stimuli designed to conjure memories. A photograph is an instance, allowing one to recall a time now passed. Without the instance of the photograph from which to ground my re-collection, all these moments—whether shared or having only been perceived by me—will be lost. The issue is not technology; the issue is memory, and mine has been failing for four years. A brain fog that will never pass.

I knew it was hopeless, but I set an appointment the next day to have the screen fixed with money I really could not afford to spend, knowing it was likely an issue that had gone beyond mere display. All they could offer was to essentially replace the phone for more than double the price of a screen repair. While not the most terrible deal, all my photos would be trapped on the locked phone with no conceivable way to access them. There is no backup. All anyone can muster in the aftermath of these situations is well-meaning advice to back up your data before the next time this will undoubtedly happen again. It never matters. Even if you do your best, something still goes wrong. If I were to tally all the happenings since my having moved to New York, on paper, the deltas would surely outweigh the pluses. However, no one lives life on paper anymore.

But then, sometimes, things are not as bad as you thought. Wading in the midst of the rubble, you think to check elsewhere and, sure enough, there exists a partial catalog. The last year-and-a-half in images might still be missing, but it is something. It has saved what you feared was gone forever. For you, it’s enough. So, do you consider yourself spared?

I suppose it is rather fitting that the act of deleting was the last time I will ever see each and every one of those pictures, having gone through the last eight years of lives in order to trim the digital fat. It is certainly devastating to think about: all the planned video ideas that can never be started, let alone finished, the loss of an ongoing record that provided some sense of linear time, all those instances you want to always have on demand. Yet, what else can I do but accept my fate, even try to enjoy it? For a second, I worried about publishing this—it’s too personal, too much about me—but I will wake up in the morning a completely different person. After all, I am unburdened by the depths of memory. I cannot be upset. I have already forgotten.

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