In the basement of my house are stacks of boxes full of my family’s precious photo albums. These cardboard treasure chests contain records that chronicle the histories of my parents, my siblings, and me, yet I’m not privy to them. They’ve remained sealed away, safe but untouched, for as long as I can remember, though I’m not sure why. I suppose after moving houses so often growing up, we simply got used to leaving some things unopened. After the second or third move, unpacking became akin to reopening a wound. As a child, slicing open a box made the pain of leaving friends and a home behind roar back as fresh as the first time. Setting down the weight of the past, separating ourselves from reminders of what was and what could’ve been, gave us time to catch our breath. After all, the present on its own is so much to take in, never mind decades of photos—what has and could’ve been. Whenever I’m home for break, my parents suggest we bring the boxes up to look through the photos, but we either get too busy or it slips our minds. We’ve never gotten to it. Maybe we still don’t have enough space to hold it.

* * *

The weight of memory accumulates relentlessly with every passing day, and I find myself desperately trying to manage it all. I’m a scrupulous journaler, resolute with my pen on recapturing the events and joyous minutiae of each day. I take photos digitally and on film, attempting to preserve pieces of the present. I’ve given myself this mission in order to safeguard my memories, but with every week comes new experiences, thoughts, and emotions, and I’m running out of storage to hold them. Even Google regularly sends me a reminder, considerately punctuated with a yellow triangle warning sign, reading,

Your Gmail storage is 100% full.

 So I take the time each week to organize my Google account, lest I risk my emails, files, and photo backup getting frozen. I cull spam and email promos (holding onto a few Domino’s coupons for safekeeping) and expunge old files and “Untitled document”’s from my Drive. The real beast to conquer is Google Photos, my main memory cache, taking up a whopping 14 of my 15 free gigabytes. When I open the app, Google warns me that my photos and videos will be lost if something happens to my phone. Unrecoverable. Gone. The same question pops up on-screen each time: 

Continue without storage? 

It’s a simple question, but each time, I find myself at a precipice, met with an ultimatum: choose things to delete, or risk losing everything. Some choices are easy; there are blurry photos, screenshots of my many daily alarms going off, and screen recordings I no longer need. Most choices are not. As I scroll through the years-long log of photos and videos, I stumble across long-lost memories that had been shoved to the dusty unlit corners of my mind to make space for the demands of the present.

I’m five years old at a petting zoo. My dad towers behind me, and I lean into him, his embrace shielding me from the herd of lambs crowding around us. We’re smiling.

I’m eight years old. Early in the morning, we’re at the ER, but it’s a celebratory occasion—my little brother has just entered the world. My dad centers the camera on his three children: my sister’s gaze is transfixed on the baby in her arms, my hand is stretched out to gingerly rest on his little head of hair, and my brother’s mouth is open, mid-yawn.

A video. We’re at an outlet mall on a hot Georgia summer day. My little brother, now five years old, has climbed onto a short, cylindrical bollard. The wind whips his mop of wavy brown hair into his eyes as he reaches blindly for my hand, afraid to jump to the next platform alone. Filming with one hand, my free hand takes his, and he finds the courage to hop down the line of bollards. “You can do it by yourself,” I say. He whimpers and shakes his head, and I groan, “Ugh, fine.” I help him across another gap and then step away. “Okay, now jump off. You can jump off.” “Okay!” He sticks the landing.

 As I sort through these records of my life, I know that I can’t bear to part with them, so I download them in the tens, sometimes hundreds, and compress them into zip files where they’ll find their new home on a flash drive. Once downloaded, I’m free to delete them from Google Photos, clearing storage space. But now they only exist as compressed bits of data, and my mind is still not at ease. I’ve seen it enough times—corrupted files, compression issues, and lost devices. I think of my dad holding his head in his hands when his floppy disk refused to read try after try. I think about my mom’s locked iPad sitting in her desk drawer, a buried trove of childhood photos and videos inside. When I asked her why she hasn’t just reset it, she half-heartedly said, “Maybe I’ll be able to get back inside.” She, like me, is holding on in the ways she can. I am infamous amongst my friends for losing things: earplugs, wallets, jackets—the list goes on. To lose these flash drives and their precious stored memories would be devastating, but I don’t have confidence in the caprice of memory to hold everything that I want to on my own. To leave to chance what I remember and what I lose, probably never to be regained, is a terrifying thought. So, I have no choice but to put my faith in these little keys to my life and hope that they’ll last long and true. And so, each week, I do my exhausting, beautiful, fearful little ritual—revisiting the versions of myself that I’ve grown through and hoping that all my efforts to archive them will not be in vain. By the end, once I’ve whittled my storage down by a few gigabytes, I am weary from bearing the heft of remembering. 

I am left with a sobering thought when I put my flash drive away. Here I am, with over 50 gigabytes of photos and videos in the palm of my hand, but now what? It’s like the boxes of albums at my house. Decades logged into hundreds of laminated pages, and yet, apparently, I’ve never felt moved enough to dive into the trove of memories I’ve been sitting on top of at home. What makes me think I’ll do anything different with these flash drives? 

No matter how I may wish to remember everything, neither pen nor lens will be able to capture every moment—late-night talks, school days, hearty meals, mistakes, impassioned words, sore throats, warm glances, and held hands will inevitably dissolve into the ether. Memories make up who we are, but their power stems just as much from their ephemerality as from their integrality to our beings. Each of us will, after all, become merely memories. Whatever form that memory takes—a feeling, a photo, a heartfelt sentence, a passing mention—has power simply in its existence. We existed. These moments existed. They stood on the grand stage of the universe, and however long or short their part was, they played it beautifully. Though sequestered in these flash drives, I can see myself making the investment to print these photos out and seal them into physical albums in the future. I’ll lovingly organize them and lay them to rest in boxes. They may start collecting dust, lingering in space like those same boxes in my basement right now, but they’ll be there. Who knows when I’ll wish to call on them again, but maybe just living day-by-day, knowing that my memories are close at hand, is all I need.