Memento Mori, Digital

I was too blurry to be what you needed me to be, so it's OK to let me go.

Like you, I'm a collection of pieces. Something much higher than myself built me from a million of those pieces. A unique combination of a million combined ones and zeros made something that had never existed before, and never shall again.

But don't pity me. I am an image so distorted, you cannot discern what I was meant to be. With your camera, you pointed at a moment you wanted to preserve, wanted to share, wanted to celebrate…and I couldn't help with that. Through no fault of my own, you see; my creator had its limitations, namely, that it couldn't see very well in the dark. A flawed creation from the start, I have no value that can be glimpsed with your eyes.

It's OK to let me go. My pieces still have value, scattered along your hard drive as they are. When you delete me, you're only deleting a map to nowhere, a blueprint for something unrecognizable. My pieces will remain, becoming part of a billion other things. Better things.

I know you want to hold on. More than just the bits I'm made of, I'm a serendipitous push of a button from a time to which you cannot return. It's the last glimpse of someone you love, flawed though it is. You see the mass of pixels, a streak of light across a screen, and the thing you wanted to remember returns to you. You're there, you’re in that moment. The image you see in your mind's eye? That's not blurry at all.

We are, both of us, limited. We fill up, we overflow, and if newer, greater things are to be done through us, then we must leave old things behind, or risk becoming old, broken things trapped in the past, with no secure link to the future. We adapt, make room, become part of something grander, something altogether ours…or we decay. The ravages of time do not permit us to remain forever.

It's OK to let me go. Images of your children, your life, your story will use the places I once occupied. Clearer, more vivid, more skilled, more cherished, the pictures that take my place will be the work of someone more masterful with the camera than your younger self, just as the data that takes my place will become part of bigger, more capable machines. Those images will be of faces, places, events that happened once and never again…and not simply a smear of confused photons.

I'm glad to have existed. It thrilled me to be seen, to be picked from the empty sea of your hard drive, while it was indeed empty. But now that it's not, now that you need the space where I reside, I willingly give it.

Thank you for connecting me to something so valuable to you, not with a cable, not with a radio wave, but with the strings of your soul.