I don’t tend to change my phone every time a new model comes up. I’m still using an iPhone XR, bought in 2018 when it was first released, and it has further extended its life by learning that iOS support will at least extend for another year. Unfortunately, it has a low memory space (64GB), and as I don’t sync with iCloud, the phone is always on the verge of running out of memory. I manage most of the time by running only essential apps and offloading the rest, but after every new iOS release, there is always a step change in memory used by the system, and I need to do an ‘Autumn Clean’ of the phone, as we spring clean the house.

Over half of my phone memory is taken up by photos and videos, mostly of our kids. After this year’s iOS upgrade, I had to free up the storage space to ensure the phone was suitable for another year, and removing apps alone would not have been enough. As I started to delete pics and videos of the kids — some of them 6-7 years old — I was overcome by a sad, morose feeling, as if stricken by the loss of something precious. I instantly thought of The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, how Jim Carrey lost the memories of Kate Winslet, one by one, desperately trying to cling onto them until they disappeared. Whilst choosing which items to delete, I looked at the photos and videos, reliving the place and when they were taken. When I deleted them and finally erased them from the deleted items folder, it felt as if, with the photos and videos, the memories were gone forever as well. It also felt as if the significance of that memory, that moment, and, in essence, my love for my children had suddenly diminished. By letting that piece of memory disappear, I pushed them further away from me. It was a gloomy day outside with heavy rain, and these thoughts didn’t take much to make me feel even more dismal.

I had very few photos of my childhood; maybe the count wouldn’t go past 50 until I was nearly 30 when I first had a phone with a camera. It used to be a treat when I’d go to my uncle’s house, and my cousins would take photos. Reels cost a lot in those days, and so did developing prints. Those photos are kept with utmost care to be passed on to my daughters when they become adults. Once I had the camera phone and a digital camera shortly after, photos became easy, and the limitations of reels were gone, which meant that photography became commonplace. The more pictures and videos we make, the more banal they become of their significance.

Of course, every single photo or video ever taken is backed up in three hard drives, so deleting them from my phone only meant they would be difficult to access but never lost. However, the point I mentioned about the banality of their existence — it only meant that although the means are there, they are hardly ever going to be accessed. Before, the kids could go on the phone and look at pics and videos from when they were babies in arms, toddlers, or transformed into children. When the items were deleted from the phone, they, in fact, are gone forever, for we will never relive those unique moments the same way again. Until I see them again, those memories will indeed be wiped out of the memory. If only by chance I ever open one of the backup hard drives on a random day, I’d be able to see some of the ‘less important’ moments — perhaps the second or third time they walked or the tenth time they played a lullaby donkey, opening their last Christmas or birthday present — and be teleported to a period that has long gone. It proves my sense of loss of something precious was indeed true, as well as the brutal finality and irreversibility of time. At that very time, I wish I could go back to those times and wonder if things could have turned out differently, but all that will be left at that time are memories. It reminded me of one of the most iconic movie quotes: All those memories will be gone forever, like tears in rain.

Enough said on my irrational thoughts. It’s not something you can ramble on for ages. Perhaps all these feelings stem from the fact that, of late, I have been thinking about memories. I was witnessing the older generations slowly disappear, and it made me more conscious about the memories — the disappointment of not having gathered enough from the people who are no more, the preciousness of my own memories and dragging them out from the farthest crevices of my brain, and finally the uncertainty of how I’d pass them on to the kids and whether those memories would be cherished as much as I do.

Next time, I’ll just get a phone with a big motherf*cking memory!