The cloud follows me like a nosy neighbor. It thinks it knows me from my comings and goings. 

“Your weekend in DC!” it declares when I take a lot of videos of myself atrociously fiddling on the recorder.

“Your trip to Houston!” it grins as it presents me with fourteen photos I took of an already-dented rental car on a work trip. 

It has no finesse. It feeds me my past. 

Your memories. Three years ago.

Your memories. Five years ago.

Your memories. Ten years ago.

It assumes these memories are all good. 

Maybe that’s a fair assumption, based on my behavior. After all, I’ve got a digital garage teeming with these memories. They must mean something to me. 

Or maybe they’re too painful, too overwhelming, to look at long enough to cull.

Maybe both.

What the cloud doesn’t know is that having videos of you is so weird. Weird enough to creep me out, but not so weird that I have to purge them. Pictures are strange enough but videos are even stranger. It’s like you’re still alive in my computer. You’re also alive in the world, as far as I know, but in a very different way than you’re alive in my computer. Yet if I scroll back a certain way, there you are in motion and with sound, from years ago. I can stop you and start you when I like. It’s unnatural.

“Cull Google Photos” is a task on my to-do list. It’s been there for literally years, and it will probably be there until the to-do list itself vanishes when the internet collapses. But who knows? Maybe I’ll get around to it one of these days.

In the meantime, I’ve got memories served up to me daily.