Computer

Photo by AB on Unsplash

This morning I wiped the memory of an old laptop before giving it away. It was frustrating, particularly when I’ve recently become used to the speed of a new MacBook and I was dealing with a fourteen-year-old Toshiba. The tedious task of moving documents to a pen drive and combing files to see what’s worth saving or should be deleted. 

 

It’s a draining emotion similar to moving house. What should be kept or binned? Photographs from my twenties followed by the expected cruel comparison; passwords no longer valid; old documents for accountants I stopped using years ago but may be necessary to prove I was here in those times; drafts of a blog I wrote in Spanish; an embarrassingly boastful old CV.

A period of five years in my life entirely stored on a laptop, now a selection of its greatest hits is on a pen drive. Many of those pictures and thoughts are on Facebook though, and, although I closed my account more than a year ago, everybody knows how Zuckerberg works. Erasing that past – for security, for intimacy – was more a performance, similar to ripping up the picture of an ex-lover who couldn’t be less bothered by our tantrum.