how it feels to collect you:
(I have been trying to reframe some of my language from “archiving” to “collecting,” as I believe that it is more accurate. Archiving implies a method of organization and an attention to certain information that I am currently disregarding.)
- like a betrayal of your current self, the you who is not reading this right now, the “future you” to whom you wrote as a despairing high school sophomore
- like re-committing my love to you, both in the past and in the present
- like delaying our reunion. It feels like keeping a secret from you, that I love(d) you so fiercely that I want to bring you with me to my imaginary escape hatch. In some cases it means that I don’t feel comfortable reaching out to you in the present until I finish
archivingcollecting your past. - like saying goodbye to you again, like mourning your absence, like the pain of remembering how much I missed you and how we were supposed to escape together
- like watching a thousand versions of all of the things I have missed in the interim – your weddings; the births of your children; your master’s degrees; your divorces; the deaths of your parents
- like trying to understand that sometimes people are in one’s life for a particular amount of time, and you move past one another and diverge
My partner is mystified as to why I won’t automate this process. By now surely I would have found an easier way so save your entries that can also keep me from another IP-ban. Despite the fact that a program is smarter and automatically more thorough than I could ever be, more complete in every way, and also significantly faster, there is something that feels more complete and more secure to do it myself. I want to know that I have opened your monthly archives, manually saving your single entries in folders.
Most of the time I skim lightly over your entries, avoiding reading them in order to save time and keep my momentum. I look for links or reasons to come back for a more careful review, then I save the file under its six-digit number, close out of it, and move on. Even then, I am catching enough to follow onto the contours of your life at the time. Besides, even in the situations where I am just running a command to pull from the Internet Archive, I can’t help but take the time to expand all of your snapshots, to spend a few hours piecing your past together and remembering– our time together; our time apart.
I’ll always wish for more. Ever the neurotic completionist, I can never find enough of you for my repository.