CTRL + ALT + V

There are dead people literally everywhere.  And I can pull them up whenever I feel the need for some answers or a one-way dialogue. Chat would be a bit of an exaggeration. Mostly, though, I don’t. They just hang out in my contacts, tucked alphabetically between the living. Its no-good calling them now. Though I could for a time. I could leave messages to the afterlife. More for my sake than theirs. It’s not like they could tell me they never made it wherever they were going, is it? Ask for a ride back. What’s for dinner?

Some of them still have photographs attached. Their best mug shots. Some still have message threads I can scroll through the years of an entire relationship. And some can still speak. One little button and I hear a voice that no longer exists whenever I want and wherever I happen to be. That laugh, the exasperated sigh, the way they said my name. Like they loved me.  It is not memory exactly. It’s more honest than that. I don’t need to reconstruct it. Make it mine as such. It just exists. A strange little truth. Not half exactly, but certainly not whole.

Memory is less reliable that. It shifts around when you least expect. You think you know what she looked like. But her Face blurs at the edges. Conversations disappear into under water. Words drowning without the weight of the tongue to bolster them. Eventually you can’t remember whether someone really said something or whether you have just told the story so many times that the retelling has become the main event. But a voice note refuses to shapeshift that way. It stays exactly where she left it. “Hello. Its nana. But you know that right? See you soon -today? Maybe?” Her voice rises at the end. The little giggle. The same laugh. Same pause. The same breath before a sentence. In a weird way, It’s comforting to know you didn’t make her up.

Is this the post-meta afterlife?

It’s not like we haven’t always been obsessed with legacy. Leaving a little piece of ourselves behind. Or collecting those pieces just to remind ourselves of the joy before the grief. Letters, photographs, clothes, handwriting, stories.

But my grandmother’s photograph cannot laugh. Neither can the gaudy Christmas jumper — ragged now from years of tradition. A letter cannot suddenly remind me of the exact rhythm of someone’s irritation. A gravestone cannot say my name. Thank the universe. That would be freaky.

We have crossed some tiny, almost invisible line between remembering the dead and being able, briefly, to re-enter them. Or reimagine them. All those pixels. Fragments we can make whole.

It’s lunchtime. I hold the phone to my ear, just to hear her voice. Just because I can. I used to wonder how I ever got anywhere without Google Maps. Now I wonder how I would get through the day without being able to hear my dead grandmother’s voice.

We haven't just invented new ways to remember the deceased; we've made scraps of their continued presence commonplace enough to use at lunchtime. The Kintsugi-ing of a human. But powdered gold was never really meant for people. The missing parts and the process of letting go are where the beauty lies.

It feels good. To hear her.

It’s been two years. One day soon, though, I know I will need to delete the message. Erase her from everywhere but memory and the odd silent photograph. Not for her. But for me. Keeping is not the same as remembering.

How can it be?