Storage Almost Full
It begins when a notification pops up on my phone: Storage Almost Full. I immediately thought of deleting some of my photos on my gallery because I know lately I have been slacking on filtering which photos deserve to stay or go, you know the all-too-familiar qualities, either shaky or too dark.
I opened Gallery on my main home screen, where the colourful circle after circle create the shape of some sort of digital flower. I scrolled up until it reaches the top. The first photo is a photo of my father and brother on his graduation day, I remember I kept it for the journey back to Bournemouth in Summer 2013. And that, exactly what follows.
Strings of pictures of Bournemouth. Of me, in Bournemouth. Then, there’s this pinch at the centre of my chest. Like, maybe one of my vein is clotted by, I don’t know, by something else, like there’s a thunder there or a mild car crash. Maybe the muscle tighten, oxygen can’t get through. I don’t know, I’m not familiar with science, carrying this on will make me look stupid.
There’s one at Sixty Million Postcards, the hippest pub in town where I had my first Bloody Mary cocktail, and my first kiss. Then there’s a picture of a pair of feet at the park, it must’ve been Joe’s, the boy I dated many Summers ago, when I was too shy to take picture of him. I swiped left for more, there were Tya, Ratih, and Omri, the home-blood relatives away from home, smiling ear to ear in front of the Winter Wonderland ferris wheel. I had my red reindeer hat from HnM on. We all looked incredibly, happy.
Right there, aside from an intense sense of longing, I cannot help but think, that those times were the best time of my life (yet) but how I wasn’t much aware of it when it was happening. I knew I had a great time, but I did not know that the greatest time of my life was happening before my eyes. In the low temperature, in one pint of cold Buffalo brewed beer, the arms of friends thousand miles away from home.
If I could go back in time, and tell the past-me that the next two years would be the greatest time I’d ever have, I probably won’t do anything differently. But I might just take more time to take a moment between the shifts of the day, at the beach, at the whiskey bar, at the bus stop, at the lower gardens, even when waiting in line at Aldi, to take a look around and inhale everything in, how pretty and in place everything was.
**
I have the option to shut my phone and put it somewhere far from my reach then tuck myself in under the duvet at least until I feel better, but I get on. I scroll down deeper, deeper into the Nostalgia abyss. Forgetting I’m here to delete some of my pictures to have more space for what’s happening now.
