guerrilla journals

This morning, I deleted over 400 emails from two inboxes (one for all things Guerrilla Rain though mostly notifications of new follower requests, and the other for miscellaneous online orders and my New Yorker subscription). At the same time, I watched Netflix's new movie “Always Be My Maybe” when a scene arrived: the male protagonist Marcus pulls out a shoebox full of memories of his childhood friend and love Sasha. And then I thought about how good it feels to delete things from my computer and how I am a millennial who grew up at the tail end of the digital age, so rather than a shoebox, I have... Tumblr and MySpace accounts that I can't log into.

I got my very first computer at age 10. It was a Dell desktop running on Windows XP set up in my bedroom with parental controls for the internet browser that I easily bypassed, but I was more interested in the word processor anyway. A friend and I wrote stories, printed them out, and exchanged them at school during lunch. Mine was a ripoff of Charmed. Hers was fanfic about Nine Inch Nails and Kittie.

I don't know what happened to them, nor the spiral notebooks of stories I handwrote during middle school French classes, nor the Polaroid photos. I don't know where my first pair of Chuck Taylor's that I had all of my friends write on (including the shoelaces!) are. The desktop and all of the drafts on there... I don't know what happened to them. I moved on to a laptop with more memories until the screen fell off. I remember deleting 100 drafts from it. Don't ask me why.

The oldest digital memory I have is from 2011 with the newer Acer laptop that I eventually poured hot soup on. (Yes, I know, you should never pour soup, hot or cold, on your electronics.) I managed to salvage the hard drive and plop it into a container thingy so I have those files saved. Still, that leaves... a lot lost.

Maybe it's good that those things are lost.

It is less of a tether in an age where digital minimalism is all the rage. But still, I miss the days of MySpace top 8s and VampireFreaks and ___ writing site that I posted all of my emo poetry shit (did Xanga used to have an offshoot site for poetry and short stories?)

I think if I spent less time being nostalgic about who I used to be and what I used to write and how many friends I used to have, I would be more... in motion. I mean, how many times can I listen to “Heartbreaker” by Mariah Carey after all before it gets old? Will it ever get old?