Loss: The Physical and the Memories

I lost my phone today. An inconvenience, of course. Phones are an expensive little tether to the world, to the social internet, to the people in your life. I run my work off my phone, and I spend more time staring at that little rectangle than anything else. I wouldn’t consider myself to have a level of phone addiction, but the level of tether to it is unmistakeable. But phones can represent so many things, and this represented loss.

Read more: Loss: The Physical and the Memories

When you change phones and turn in an old one, usually, you can install a driver that transfers all the data from one to another, so you don’t lose contacts, photos, videos, passwords, and everything else. When I last had a phone, this was seamless. The phones sat next to each other for 20 minutes, the apps all synced up, and I was back to my usual within the hour.

But this time, because I *lost* the old one, my new phone needs me to manually install apps and log back in. I turned on the new phone, and had 11 contacts, and all conversations were gone. My photo library was completely empty.

The Physical:

The phone itself was due for an upgrade. I’d had it since 2021, and its operating systems were slowly slowing to a hault. Apps were closing at random, the app I used for gig work would freeze and crash, and the sound quality got worse by the day. It had a purple case and a little sunflower band on the back. The screen protector was cracked.

But physically, on the phone, was a record of conversations had, notes taken, and so many pictures. I had dozens upon dozens of photos from the last several years. This experience has taught me one thing: if I value something, I have to have it physically. I’m resolving to get more photos printed and put away from something I literally bring around everywhere I go, and can be easily lost.

The Memories:

The memories, on the other hand, are harder to replace. So many of the lost photos are tied to memory after memory, particularly of my previous cats, of concerts and just little moments tht have mattered. And while not all of them are gone, a lot of them are. It’s weird wish I could bottle up some of the memories and put them on shelves like perfume, taking a whiff when I need a little of them. Instead, they sometimes feel like a burden.

Am I glad for a fresh start and a new phone? Yes. Am I dreading the next few days of reconfiguring the new to the old? Also, yes.

-M

PS: Did you catch last weeks post?