Creepsake #28

A memento meant to become evident gradually

I lost so much work when floppies died, when Corel WordPerfect nosed out, when Hotmail deleted the email account of my teenhood. I have lost more memories than the internet has kept, which seems impossible when one cannot escape the crunchy old haircuts of Livejournal and MySpace. The methods of “saving” your work have continued to evolve, and they say the Wayback Machine holds it all now, but during my formative writing years, the technology shifted so often—and I had swerved from Apple to PC to Mac to PC—that nothing I’d saved myself is compatible anymore, nothing opens anymore, nothing is retrievable. Everything has surged forward and unless I give it to the Cloud now, I risk losing access. It comforts me to know the old me is all there, in those floppies that I cannot access, like a bulwark against the future. The self they hold cannot be reclaimed, but they hold her nevertheless.

Like another sort of technology, my memory also holds moments deep in a trench I cannot access, one with a bottomless chasm, one I step over every day. The trench of my memory is icy-blue on the surface, but below, it turns black. My footing is strong and sure, my leaps in hobnailed boots like those of my great-great-uncle during his jack days in central Wisconsin, crossing log-choked rivers. Someday, there will be a technology to rappel toward the memories that lie at the bottom; someday, I will want to. But it is enough now to know they are held safe, frozen against time.