Marcus had 4,312 photos of his ex-girlfriend stored across three devices and two cloud accounts. He decided to delete them all in one session on a Saturday morning, which is how he discovered that he had never backed up three years of concert footage he had taken before they met, photos of his grandmother who had died in 2021, and the only existing image of his childhood dog. The photos of Lena were sorted by date, which meant the deletion process was also a chronology. He found himself stopping at intervals: the first photo he had ever taken of her, which was blurry and taken without her knowledge, a photo of her sleeping that he had forgotten existed, photos from a trip to Portland that he remembered as bad but that appeared in the images to have been mostly fine. He did not finish the deletion. He moved everything to a folder called Archive and locked it with a password he wrote on a piece of paper and put in his desk drawer. He told himself this was the practical solution because of the concert footage and his grandmother. This was partially true. He checked the archive twice in the following month, both times using the piece of paper, and then moved it to a different drawer where he was less likely to find it quickly.