“Cannot Download. There is not enough available storage to download this item. You can manage your storage usage in Settings,” my phone buzzed at me after attempting to add a new app. I was alarmed and even frightened to read that my, what I thought, all powerful phone actually ran out of space. Thankfully, I had two choices: delete just enough photos to allow space for the app, or delete a few other less important apps. Now, for a teenager of our American technological generation, that is quite a dilemma. With about seventy percent of my phone’s storage used up by pictures, I went right to the Photos app.

“Wow, over 600 pics, I can easily get rid of 100 or so,” I reassured myself, problem solved. I hadn’t recently looked through them, so having time to spare, I started at the beginning and made a little slideshow using my finger to swipe from picture to picture, while scouting out ones I could remove. I forgot about many of the first ones, taken only just over a year ago. After a few minutes when I got to the more recent photos of our road trip to the South, I realized I had only erased about 8 pictures, all of which were either old backgrounds for my screen or “accidentals.”

I decided to go through my photos a second time, my only goal now, to find the ones that didn’t need to stay. Picture number one I couldn’t trash, everyone has to save the first picture they took on their phone, right? At least that’s what I thought. Number two, a video of my sister sleepwalking, can’t throw this out! Number three, me meeting Jerry from Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream; obviously I had to keep that one. Number four, the first snowstorm of the year, keeping that. The next group of fifteen photos were from my New York trip, and I could only find three I concluded weren’t necessary to keep. Next were Christmas time pictures, which included photos of cinnamon spice cookies and icing I spent half a day making, our annual expedition to the drive through Festival of Lights, which often wasn’t as relaxing and festive as it may sound with three young sisters and poky cars, when my dad forced me to “get together for the camera with the sugar plum fairy” during the intermission of the Nutcracker ballet, and of course, Christmas morning! Just Christmas morning has its own category of pictures, ranging from presents under the tree, to a family photo of anxious kids and drowsy adults who needed their Starbucks, to our monkey bread that somehow climbed out of the pan onto the racks of the oven while cooking. Whether during Christmas morning with family or a summer night with friends, each picture has it’s own little memory, and a vivid one too.

So many of the pictures and videos are so random, they couldn’t be grouped under a specific title. One video my cousins and I laugh at every time shows me building up the courage to touch their bug zapper. Another is a photo of DC from the top of the Cathedral, and every time I look at it, memories flow from that fun day my friends and I had there singing for our chorus and exploring around. There’s a few of my friend Nora and me at drivers ed; the dull white lifeless walls behind us sum up our feelings of the place, but we could chat together for hours about all of the hilarious moments with our whacko teacher from Trinidad. Of course I have about 50 pictures of foods either I made or got from a restaurant that have me salivating whenever I look. With the exception of the picture I took of sushi that seemed delicious, at first. I just got back from swimming, it was freezing out, and I could’ve eaten a horse; I was not, however, hungry enough for caviar, which I realized was inside the Cali roll. It was the first time I cried in probably a year. My family and I now laugh over it, well, mostly my family. I really like the saying “Photographs capture the moment,” because they do. I don’t have 600 pictures on my phone because I’m a professional photographer or anything, it’s because of each special instant that the photo captures, maybe for a short 30 second chat with a sister, or simply to reminisce on alone.

A lot of why it’s so hard to remove pictures is because with almost each and every one, feelings and emotions are attached. Someone could pull any one of my photos out of a hat and I could tell what my feelings are toward it, and what they were at the time. For instance, I went on a trip to Cedar Point in Ohio toward the beginning of summer, and the night we got there, I took a picture of this 300 foot swing ride. Not even knowing what the ride is or what was going on when the picture was taken, it’s interesting to look at, but because I was there, it makes the picture even more enjoyable to look at. It’s like a domino that starts a chain of memories; it brings back the memory of walking on the cool sand toward the neon colored ride. We just finished eating at a Japanese steakhouse, and it was like the starting point of our vacation. Both of us were excited for the fun to begin, and at the same time enthralled simply by looking at the luminous swing spinning steadily in the summer sky. All that from looking back at that one photo. And to think that the one photo in my hand, of however many megapixels displayed on the cracked screen of my Apple iPhone, was once surrounding me, was the emotions I felt, all into one.

Every so often people’ll ask why I have so many pictures, “you don’t need all those pics on there” some say. I guess it is a bit of a hoarding problem, maybe I’m a photo hoarder. And they’re right, I don’t need to have any pictures on my phone, but I like having them there with me. Fear might be an appropriate word to exemplify why I hold onto them. But more so than fear of loosing memories, I think it’s the complacency of keeping them. Every once in a while flipping back through the pictures and, for a few moments, being brought back to small segments in life, not really important ones, ones that are easy to forget, like I did for many of the images before glancing back at them. After ten minutes of repeatedly looking through the same photos and deep thinking, I decided I would throw out some apps instead, and keep the seventy percent of my phone’s storage how it was to start.