Member-only story
The Archiver & the Ghost
How we all fit perfectly together
Where do I start from? A short story perhaps.
Select All, Delete.
It is the early 2000s, I am checking emails on Yahoo. In a corner of the screen, in bold-type, my inbox calls my attention to over 12,000 unread emails. At the time, junk filtering technology hadn’t matured. In those 12,000+ unread emails, there were everything from malicious spyware links waiting to be clicked, to unsolicited promotional emails, to messages from family and old friends. Overwhelmed by the sheer thought of sorting through 12,000+ emails, I clicked ‘Select All’ and hit ‘Delete.’
In a shorter time that it took me to reach that spur of the moment decision, a decade worth of emails were gone. True to my nature, I didn’t start fully evaluating the impact of my action until it was too late to initiate a reversal.
How would I get back important emails? Shouldn’t I have sorted it first? What happens now to my not-so-dependent physical memory whenever I needed any of those lost ‘zeros and ones’ to aid recall?
I felt stupid in the wake of that ill-thought decision to clear out my life. Regret, the colour of ink, sloshed into my thought stream and poisoned it. But those whom the gods love, they give a smaller calabash to hold memory, so…
