love, read, write

>> stuck in a data center

in high school the internet felt boundless. it was free in a way that my body didn't feel free. i had this running joke where i'd tell my friends i don't exist in a clumsy attempt to express the casual dissociation i was dealing with– but the internet was this place where i felt real, where i was finding ways to feel like me. it was something i looked forward to every day: i'd come home from school and i'd sit at my desk and the moment the screen loaded, my body would dissolve and i would beam my conscious mind into the internet where i could exist untethered. my senses would hone into the screen, plugged in by the convenience store earbuds, my eyes fixed on the 13 inch window into a world that i could build for myself. it satiated something i didn't know i was hungry for. i was free of my limbs, the concern directed at my body, the conversations happening in doctor's rooms, the muffled frustration i felt towards the things my physical self failed to express on behalf of the real me. the real me, the one that could simply exist uninterrupted on the internet. i told myself my soul lived there, not here. i could finally speak.

most of my time went into tumblr. it was this fountain of never-ending stuff, pouring out from the bottom of my screen with each scroll, refreshing its abundance with each ctrl+R. i'd unpack my bag, set up my school textbooks in front of me, open my laptop, and then log into tumblr.com. in the solitude of my room i'd feel it spill out into a digital ocean. i filled my little lungs with it all. i'd disappear. there was something raw about the website, the way people bled themselves onto the platform. their personal lives, their obsessions, their self-expressions. the debates, the information, the analyses. conspiracy theories. hot takes. the things i posted, which were often pieces of myself i sliced off in a private catharsis, were simply one among millions of waves in an ocean with no regard for my identity. it was this dissolution of self that let me experiment with expression and absorb the world without the jarring interruption of physical perception. i reinvented my appearance through the digital – typefaces, colors, blog themes, but never the face i was born with – which felt like i was constructing something that was my true image but also a performative creature, something that i knew wasn't real. it was under this lie that i posted things i wasn't ready to bring into utterance to my school friends. it didn't matter that nobody read those posts that i hid under "read more," that i didn't get likes or reblogs on the things that were the most personal to me. it was an act of shedding. i was addicted to tumblr. the anonymity exonerated me. the community engulfed me. i called myself "indigo."

one of my tumblr friends – xiuave was her username, a pun on suave, but with xiu- as a nod to her favorite boy band member, which i envied for its wit and succinctness (mine had a lowly hyphen in the middle) – had a routine of posting pictures on her tumblr with the tag "cleaning up my phone." i understood this as her way of transferring the photos on her phone, which had limited space (probably 16 GB at the time), onto her blog, which could not be held in the same way a phone could. i thought this was a revolutionary idea– she was right, tumblr would never run dry because the internet was not real. there was no square footage by which i could measure "full" or "almost full." i didn't pay rent for my account. it felt like a hack – i couldn't understand why anyone would possibly store anything on their device or pay extra for more storage when they could surrender it to the internet where it'd last forever for free. of course, later on all of these websites would start creating paywalls and storage limits because it wasn't free after all, we'd been paying rent in a different way. but i didn't know about the ocean of blinking lights back then, the tides of racks whirring in data centers, black metal boxes lined up in towering stacks. that my constructed self was sprinkled about somewhere in a dark warehouse in the midwest, plugged into the wall as if tethered to life support, at the mercy of the local weather in Illinois. it couldn't even roam freely. what if it wanted to travel?

i logged into my tumblr account again, ten years later. i was living in a different city in a different stage of my life. i hadn't expected the login to work, but it had, and it was there just as i'd left it, my sprawling digital presence laid out for any meandering archivist to analyze. i clicked through my old posts. my blog looked different. the soul i'd uploaded had become a hollowed ghost, haunting the domain name with half its vigor. it appeared to me a neurotically curated collage that i remembered being proud of, striking the balance between visually pleasing, authentic, and interesting."aesthetic" photography, fan edits of my favorite bands, quotes that felt poignant enough to show that i was a thoughtful person but not too convoluted to make me seem stuck-up, snippets of fanfiction, the occasional original post where i'd scribble a poem or write scathing, insecure rants. right, this used to be me. i could see her, as if i was seeing a ghost in front of me: i once sat in my bedroom in new jersey, procrastinating homework by clicking the repost button for hours on end. i learned about social justice, mental health, self expression, sexual orientation, gender identity, sitting in the same spot i'd always sit, the little wheely chair perched in front of the crayon-stained ikea desk. i remembered the depression, the self esteem, how imminent life felt at the time. i felt a sort of sadness for that child.

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>> at risk of deletion

i find out today that my school email has been deleted. my university has started to remove alumni accounts under a "storage saving initiative." i encounter this truth just as i am logging into my school account. it locks me out. tells me that my name is now DELETED USER and my profile photo has turned into the generic profile icon with an X. i stare at the screen. my account is gone? "yes," they say, "we have removed all accounts with more than 5 GB of data."

i'm devastated. we used to have an unlimited google drive. i'd put everything in there. it can't be true, i tell myself, trying to remember what was in my account (lease documents? poems? textbook epubs?), and the more i can't remember the more it feels like i've been stripped of my college years. i scour the school website and eventually find an IT page with a form link and i write a little message into it like it is a tiny confession box i can cry into: so sorry, please consider– there's a lot of stuff in there that's important to me, would it be at all possible to–

on reddit i find that a lot of people are in the same boat. "my whole life was on there" they say. i get an email reply. they say sure, we revived your account, wait an hour before logging in. i'm refreshing the login page over and over again. i feel like i'm mourning something. myself?

my files are back. they have a red tag, "PENDING DELETION," which i know means that i have 7 days to reduce my 32 GB of files into 5 GB otherwise i'll be back to DELETED USER. which is funny because my profile name still says DELETED USER even though i'm logged in now, so technically i'm UNDELETED but whatever i could cry tears of relief, it doesn't matter that my name has been replaced with a statement of absence. they're back: the excel files for trip planning, the dollars exchanged between friends in 2018 that i've lost touch with; "Untitled Document" with a single photo and half a sentence; meeting notes from a club that I started with my friends, silly scribbles in the comments. they were dead just two hours ago. i want to hug them tight kiss them on the forehead, i feel like a mother after a child has gone missing, like in those movies, running into arms i thought you were dead – they've returned, breathing, back to haunt me. 

i need to focus. i must choose which to keep and which to delete. but it's so hard – i know i haven't looked at most of these files for over five years but i'm certain i'll want to revisit them eventually, my whole life is on here, my whole life of four years, the journal entries and the meeting notes and the shared docs and the photos. the zip files. pdfs. spreadsheets. videos. i want to download it all and replicate it somewhere else. but i don't have space. maybe i'll print them out. i'll give them a proper burial. a tombstone i can walk by it'll say THIS USER WAS DELETED and i'll look at it and remember, think about the printed spreadsheets disintegrating into the soil, becoming a part of the earth, cycle of life– which is silly. i'll probably just delete most of it. some of it i'll download and put on my 1TB seagate, which will only postpone its deletion because at some point my hard drive will run out of space and anyways i will want to back it up to the cloud in case the hard drive dies but then i'll have to pay for another cloud service and they'll have their own space limits and later, later, i'll have accrued even more data and then i'll have to do the same exercise i have to do now, the same ordeal, mourning, reviewing files, picking and choosing and deleting.

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>> returning home

do you understand how it feels? do you also feel how fast life moves? i am almost thirty, and that cannot be true, cannot be real, i am just coming into my body and acknowledging the physical. i both love and hate the material world; i would never want to upload my brain into the cloud (i had just watched ghost in the shell earlier this week) because i'd be afraid what that would mean for the way i can view the world. i like the colors that my eyes produce for me. i don't want them to change. and i don't want to sit at a computer all day, i don't want to rot away at this desk – aliens might look at us and marvel at how sedentary we are, even if our fingers are hard at work, typing 100 words per minute moving the mouse clicking away and entering different cyberspaces inventing currencies but the aliens can't tell, we're just sitting there, and maybe it's true, maybe the internet isn't real, they say ergonomics are important and that we should stand up and take a walk every twenty minutes, and for the record, like i've said, i don't like this, i don't like living like this. the internet has too much of me. the internet has too much of me. i am not dead but my ghost is already here for the taking. i have harvested it myself, and it haunts me, and i return to it.