She closed the notebook and set it on her nightstand. Beside it, her phone buzzed with a notification: iCloud storage almost full. Upgrade now?
If you ever lose your photos again—by accident, by theft, by fire, by a stupid click of a button—do not panic. Do not mourn the grey squares. Close your eyes. Go to the cliff. Feel the wind. Taste the gum. Laugh until you snort. The pictures were never the real thing. You are.
Then she turned off the screen, rolled over, and for the first time in weeks, slept without dreaming of empty white squares. mis fotos borradas ox imagenes mias
One night, she found herself crying not for the lost images, but for the lost versions of herself. The Lucía who had been carefree enough to snort-laugh. The Lucía who had baked bread from scratch during a lonely winter. The Lucía who had stood on that cliff and believed, genuinely believed, that life would always feel that wide and blue.
It had started as a clumsy accident. Two weeks earlier, she’d been cleaning up her iCloud storage—screenshots, memes, blurry videos of concerts. She’d selected what she thought was a folder of duplicates and hit “Delete All.” It wasn’t until the next morning, when she went looking for a picture of her late grandmother’s handwriting, that she realized the truth. She closed the notebook and set it on her nightstand
She sat up in bed, heart thumping. Mis fotos borradas. My deleted photos.
She wrote the taste of the gum on the Menorca cliff. She wrote the sound of her grandmother’s slippers on the kitchen tile. She wrote the exact temperature of the tattoo needle against her ribcage—not cold, not hot, but a kind of electric hum. She wrote the names of people whose faces she could no longer summon. She wrote the joke that had made her snort-laugh (something about a penguin and a broken refrigerator). She wrote the flour on her cheek and how, for ten minutes, she had refused to wipe it off because it made her feel like someone who knew how to live. If you ever lose your photos again—by accident,
And then she began to write.
The screen glowed blue in the dark. She had been dreaming of the sea—of a specific cliff on the coast of Menorca where, five years ago, she had felt truly happy. In the dream, she was looking at photos from that trip on her phone. But when she tried to swipe to the next image, every picture turned white. Empty. Deleted.