MEMOIR
The Forgotten Lives of Forgotten Phones
What I learned about myself by restoring my first ever iPhone
A couple of weeks ago, I found an old iPhone of mine sitting in a drawer. It had died a natural death all the way back in 2013. Its screen was so cracked that if it were to ever see the light of day again, I wasn’t sure I could even manage to make out what it had to say. But on a whim, I decided to see if my local repair store could fix this ancient Apple relic from my early digital days.
To my surprise, it worked.
All of my old conversations, my call logs, and voicemails had lingered somewhere within the circuitry of this dead phone for over a decade. I could even see my old notes, music, photos and videos. What I had accepted as a total loss back in middle school when its screen went dark suddenly returned for me from the brink of technological oblivion.
With the reemergence of all this old information has been an almost ghostly resurrection of who I was then. It gives a glimpse into forgotten parts of myself. So many of the memories encased within these old photos had laid dormant for years and years. Video footage of some of my most memorable adolescent days were intact. Events that I could describe only vaguely had resurfaced in fully-realized detail.
