We sat in the kitchen and the light from the streetlamp made orange squares on the floor. Sarah said we went to the coast in July and I said it was August. I remembered the heat and the way the grass looked yellow and dry. She remembered the rain and the grey sky.

I reached for my phone and I wanted to prove that I was right. I opened the map app and I looked for the history. The app told me it had no data for that month. I checked the bank app and it asked for a thumbprint and then it told me the server was down for maintenance. I checked the photos and there were no photos of a beach. I looked at Sarah and she looked at me and we were both orphans of our own experience.

The Ownership of Life

It was a small argument and it did not matter but the silence that followed was heavy. I realized that I had no way to know my own life. I had lived the days and I had spent the money and I had walked the streets but the proof of those things lived in a building I would never visit.

It lived in a rack of servers owned by a man who did not know my name. If that man decided to delete the rack or if the company changed its mind about storage then my July or my August simply vanished.

I am a dyslexia intervention specialist and I spend my days building scaffolds for minds that struggle to hold onto sequences. We use blocks and we use colors and we use tactile maps to make the abstract feel real. I understand that the brain is a leaky bucket and we need tools to catch the drips.

But we have moved from using tools to using masters. We do not carry the bucket anymore and we just pay a subscription to a company that promises to hold the water for us.

The Disappearance of Years

I made a mistake three weeks ago and the mistake still haunts me. I was cleaning my digital storage and I wanted to make more space. I am not good with small icons and the letters sometimes swim when I am tired. I selected a folder and I thought it was the folder for old work projects.

I clicked the button and the prompt came up and I clicked yes. I did not realize until the next morning that I had deleted three years of photographs. They were not on my hard drive and they were not on my desk. They were on a server and I had told the server to forget them.

I called the customer support line and I waited for forty minutes. A man named Silas answered and he had a voice that sounded like tired velvet.

“The database does not care about your wedding and it does not care about your grief.”

– Silas, Customer Support

He told me that once the command is sent and the sync is complete the data is overwritten. There is no trash can in the sky. There is only the presence of data or the absence of it. I sat in my chair and I felt a physical hollow in my chest. Three years of my children growing and three years of my dog running in the park were gone because I had clicked a box that I could not properly read.

This is the price of the convenience we bought. The shoe box was dusty and it could burn in a fire but it was in my house. I could touch the paper and I could see the ink. Now we have an efficiency that feels like magic until the moment it feels like a ghost. We have lost the habit of noticing that we are no longer the primary witnesses to our own lives.

The Need for Verification

When you go to a place of entertainment you want to know that the rules are fixed and the history is clear. If you are playing a game and the cards are dealt by a computer you are trusting a ghost. You cannot see the shuffle and you cannot see the stack. You are asking a corporation to tell you what happened and you have no way to verify the truth.

This is why some people look for a different way. They look for the live stream and they look for the human hand. On a platform like

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the dealer is a person and the cards are real and the video runs in a constant stream that you can see. You are not trusting an algorithm to tell you that you lost or won and you are watching the event happen.

There is a record of the deposit and there is a record of the play and those records are available to the member. This is a small thing but it is a vital thing. It is the ability to look back and say that this happened at this time and here is the evidence. Most of our modern life is a black box. We put our time and our money into the box and we trust the box to give us the right answer back. We have stopped asking to see the gears.

The Era of Scarcity

I spoke to a friend who works in digital law and he told me that we are entering an era of “evidence scarcity.” He said that in the past a person could produce a diary or a bundle of letters in a court of law. Now a person has to subpoena a third party to prove where they were on a Tuesday.

If the third party has a retention policy of ninety days and the court case is in a year the evidence is gone. The person knows they were at the library but the library was a digital event and the event has been purged.

We have outsourced our testimony. We have told the machines to remember for us and then we have given the machines to the corporations. It is a slow-motion loss of agency. We feel lighter because we do not have to carry the weight of our records but we are also thinner. We are less substantial because we cannot ground ourselves in our own facts without asking for a password.

I spent the evening after the photo loss looking through my physical drawers. I found a receipt from a hardware store from 2018. It was for a hammer and a box of nails. The ink was fading and the paper was thin but I held it in my hand.

I remembered the day I bought the hammer. I remembered the way the air smelled like sawdust. I did not need a server to tell me that the transaction had occurred. I was the owner of that memory and the receipt was my witness.

Streams and Pools

I worry about the children I teach. They are growing up in a world where everything is a stream and nothing is a pool. They do not have scrapbooks and they do not have ticket stubs. They have “content” that is served to them and then taken away.

If they want to know who they were five years ago, they will have to hope that their parents paid the storage bill. They will have to hope that the platform they used is still in business. There is a deep anxiety in this and we do not talk about it.

We talk about privacy and we talk about who is watching us. We do not talk about the fact that we are losing the ability to watch ourselves. We are becoming characters in a story that is being written by someone else’s database. When the database updates the story changes and we have no way to argue with the edit.

The Weight of a Shell

I went back to the kitchen and I sat with Sarah. I told her about the photos and she cried a little and then she stopped. She went to a cabinet and she pulled out a small wooden box. She had kept the shells from the beach trip.

There were three white shells and one that was broken. She put them on the table and the orange light from the streetlamp hit them.

“It was August. The shells are from the cove where the water was warm. The water is only warm in August.”

I touched the broken shell and I felt the grit of the sand. I did not need the map app and I did not need the bank statement. I had the evidence. It was small and it was fragile and it was sitting on my table. It was mine. I had not asked a corporation for permission to hold it. I had not logged in to see it.

We need to find ways to reclaim our records. We need to value the systems that allow us to see the history and hold the logs. We need to realize that a life without a personal archive is a life that can be rewritten by a stranger.

I am a teacher and I know that structure is everything. Without a scaffold the building falls. Without a record the memory fades. I will not get my photos back and that is a grief I must carry. But I will buy a notebook and I will keep the receipts and I will look for the games where the cards are real and the dealers are human.

I want to be the one who testifies about my life. I want to be the one who knows what happened in August.