![]() Now, when I hold my thumb down, I can watch as she takes a photo of herself smiling, head moving to the left and right for the best angle. I took her cellphone and texted myself all the other selfies she had taken. After she died, I went through our text messages and downloaded every photo she had ever sent me of herself. When she used to send me selfies of a new haircut, she didn’t realize she was sending me live photos. Sometimes I call him hoping he won’t pick up so I can hear her. One is 23 seconds and the other is only 4 seconds long, a simple “call me please bye.” When my father took over her cellphone after she died, he never changed her outgoing voice message. For instance, I don’t actually have any videos of my mother left on my phone. I think about all the photos I deleted of people that I love and no longer have in my life - and even myself, growing older - because I needed the space on my phone. ![]() Photos that would work well in photo dumps - the ennui floating across our timelines now - pictures of the same skies, memes that made me wonder what I was going through when I screenshotted them, the random detritus of my life and the internet that I have been collecting for years. I had deleted those to make space for more photos months later. I had also taken videos, but there was no video evidence of her petting buffalo or laughing at ostriches that strode alongside our truck. ![]() I had taken roughly 20–30 photos of her that day. Which isn’t to say she wasn’t already sick - it was just her decline hadn’t yet become severe. My mother died in the fall of 2019, but in these photos she was smiling and full of life. ![]() In the endless scroll, I found a cluster of photos of my mother feeding animals at a wild animal park in Texas. There were also chunks of time that I sped over, uninterested in feeling the sharp pain of seeing people who are no longer in my life. As we mindlessly scrolled, we found moments that we had spent together over the past decade, even though we don’t live in the same city. My friend, who sat beside me, had tens of thousands of photos on hers dating back even further. It was a welcome reprieve from the internet, but instead of reading a book or doing anything productive, I spent three hours scrolling through the photos in my phone - I have thousands dating back to 2007. On a recent five-hour flight, I was wholly without Wi-Fi. ![]()
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