memories in megabytes
Never put all your eggs in one basket so as they say.
I had lost an USB back then, it was nowhere to be found. The USB contained valuable photographs of my family and childhood pictures. The USB is covered in yellow with a swivelable metal shell. By all probability, there was no chance it could happen. It has always sat next to the family PC desk unmoved and untouched. But the probability I had misestimated was not zero.
The younger me gushed into tears.
The USB contained everything that I once had. A yesterday, a memory, that in each passing second, I can never get to back to it yet in multitude bits of zeros and ones, I can seem to grasp it. Now it is lost to the literal unknown.
Do files immediately disappear soon as it is deleted from the computer? Does it evaporate to the skies, turning to dust, the same material God had formed man with?
I don't want it to be forgotten. Files 'disappear' because we have excluded it from our systems for it to be forgotten but I won't let it be forgotten. I won't.
.
Fortunately, my family owned several hard drives so it was not the end of the world. But still, pictures, simply matrices of numbers, stored in bytes immortalizing (or not) a moment of our time, I don't know what can be any more romantic than this. I'm thinking, with memories being captured in photos and videos, if a great blackout were to happen a la Blade Runner 2049, I can see why polaroid, printed photographs, and hard copies still remain as valuable. They are, still, prone to rusts, damages, and water but I suppose all things that test with time must be taken great care of.