I managed to go from 270GB to 150GB on my iCloud storage, but eventually I got overwhelmed with checking and deciding for each photo. "Okay, a selfie during dinner with a friend I no longer talk to." Digital nowhere (trash) or a void of decaying pixels (my gallery)? I write like I'm killing someone, as if it's in my hands to keep you alive... No, this isn't a person. This is data. Inanimate. Static. These Live Photos don't make you any real-er... god, I'm still hoarding data. Do I really need this useless candid photo a friend took of me in 2025? Do I need to keep this screenshot of a movie list from an old phone in 2019? I kept repeating these questions in my head until I realized I could no longer debate the semantics of "memories," because my memories aren't actually my own. You pay for 200GB, use up 210GB. Well, Apple doesn't have a 210GB plan. Either you delete the 10GB or cancel the service. Lose access to everything. "Pay for 500GB instead, otherwise what happens to the remaining 10GB of you?" Buy the rest of yourself for more of yourself. How much of you do you want to keep? How much of you can you afford? All these live moments, it only takes a tap to hear what it was like to live in 2021. It only takes a tap to see the younger you live again. You've sold so much of yourself, uploaded so much of you—what's another 500 gigabytes? Your life is in pixels. You'll live through pixels. What's another 500 gigabytes? So fuck it. I went to iCloud.com and requested for a Takeout of all of my data. Save what's left of what I could download. Save the people I used to be, people that I used to know. Saving people that have long gone. Well, they're not... dead. I'm just talking about JPEGs, for fuck's sake. Maybe before all of this, memories could just pass. They'll live within their own pocket of time, not some corner of cyberspace. Letting go is another conversation I'll have for another time. For now, these backups of me will live on an actual 2TB hard drive that I own, as if photos require life support. Maybe I have to accept that the me who lives and breathes in the moment I'm borrowing isn't living in this picture. I am. Deleting a photo feels like I'm killing an old version of me. Killing—discarding—you. I have to keep you alive because without you, who am I? However I'm not ready to answer that question, so I'll do what I've always done: keep you somewhere, so you're not totally gone. I mean, at least I'm not taking up server space this time. At least my memories aren't for ransom. All my pictures. The games. The apps. The random micro-purchases I'd accumulated over a decade. Years of digital clutter, neatly tied to an account that could disappear the moment I can no longer afford to rent myself back. We've built a system where we conflate what's online with live, and then for actual life. What's dynamic with what exists. More gigabytes of ourselves we should afford to keep in motion... Humans have this nasty fascination of reanimating the dead to keep them alive. I mean, give an object enough motion and you can call it live, right? So, how much of you is on a drive? How much are you willing to pay to keep? How much of you are you willing to delete?