I have eleven thousand photos on my phone and I looked at exactly none of them last year. I know they’re there. I scroll past the notification telling me I have memories to review. I take the new photo, add it to the pile, move on. The pile is evidence. Of meals, trips, faces, light through a window at a specific time on a specific day. If I delete any of it I feel like I’m deleting the thing itself, like the day would stop having happened. So the pile grows and I look at none of it.

I took so many photos to make sure I wouldn’t forget, and now I have a collection of things I never look at and can’t throw away. I scrolled back through a month of them yesterday and felt almost nothing. A sunset. Some food. My own feet at the beach. They don’t bring the moments back. They’re just the receipts. The actual afternoons are gone either way. Did you think that documenting something would help you keep it? What do you actually remember from the things you photographed?