On Tuesday I changed my mobile and lost all my whatsapps of the last two years. The transfer seems easy, the tutorials promise you that it will be. With your cloud key you only have to download a mirror image of who you have been throughout this time and the phone is cloned. Regarding other transitions, I admit that this one was easier. Devices are automating more and more things, wifi they are shared with each other and the data is downloaded quickly. If you don’t feel like thinking a lot, it’s best to accept everything. It is a road without too many potholes.
I was in a hurry to go out and wanted to do it with my new mobile. Not to brag Not by teaching it. There comes a time when so many have passed through your hands that it is not even exciting. They tell me that it is very taurus. I made sure the photos were hyperspaced because I have a five year old and in those snapshots his soul is stored. In this you are going to allow me to be a little spiritual – or superstitious -. But I didn’t pay that much attention to it. whatsapp. For a couple of days I also had to walk with the old phone because the application did not finish downloading on the new one. You should have seen me with my cell phone sandwich, both the same size and almost exact information. Very big shot me, very Gordon Gekko. People who carry two phones have to be twice as important.
But, listen, it was pretty frustrating. The thing had to progress and the turning off and on again thing wasn’t working so I plugged in youtube, I watched the first 20 seconds of a legitimate-looking video that simply suggested removing the outdated mobile app. Now I could live in a dark drawer like the humiliated dolls of Toy Story. In one of the steps of that tutorial they asked you if you had made a backup copy of your conversations and I said of course yes because at night I see that the pot does things and I believe that it works for my well-being. “Surely it has been copied. I’m sure it’s all there.”
I felt a little chill, yes. I wondered what would happen if everything didn’t reappear the way you wonder if you blew out the candle in the living room when you left the house—if some of the conversations I had late at night were lost—but I thought it wouldn’t be so bad. Those texts that were better than the average, that did not have an entity of whatsapp but from bottled letters, I was methodically copying them in an ever growing computer note, which is what we very manic sentimental people do. He was ready for that transplant, which of course ended badly.
When finally registering the program on the new phone, it informed me that the conversations had been saved from September 18, 2021 backwards, but nothing between that day and the present. “What a tragedy”, I said to myself very much in the ancient Greek style, and I poured myself a glass of water to make it go away. I inquired into chats before long from recent friends and I found two wastelands, as if everything was to be rebuilt. Or to discard. There were relationships erased, annulled, canceled and whitewashed, or at least that’s how it was on this side of the river. I knew that if I worked hard I could ask them for answers and make them flower like a cutting but for a flash I felt comfortable with this new anonymous life in witness protection where the only one who thought he was hiding was me. I have friends who have uninstalled whatsapp because they don’t want to be constantly monitored —and because they are a little new age—: “If they need me, they will call me. If you need me you can send me a sms”. I wasn’t aiming for anything that radical, just a microscopic purge. A little sigh.
There are two games that I do sometimes. Or did. It is about looking for a filler or phrases to see how many times he used them and with whom. Words that caricatured me and are no longer there. That trait of my personality has been lost, and I could rebuild it or simply replace it with another and become someone else. Now I can be whoever I want! On the other hand, there are people I only know for professional reasons, because they work in this or that other company I work with, which were the names I was looking for in our conversations to be able to resume negotiations, and none of that is there either. If they want me, they’ll come back. If I want them, I’m sure I’ll know how to find them. I am a journalist!
There are, and this is more critical, friendships and intense relationships that I maintained and supported in a somewhat epistolary way during that specific time, the true great blackout. People I met in October 2021 and with whom I met on one or two birthdays, with whom I met four or three times, with whom I had eight or seven drinks and three or two specialty coffees, and we laughed, I’m sure we laughed, but where is our trajectory now, where is our past. they have made me like Will Smith —not about the host but about that flashlight— and I no longer know nor will I know what we were, how our us. What I liked will remain in my memory in a modest, domestic, ancestral, analogical and handmade way. What hurt will be lost like a burned page, first this corner, then the rest little by little, and let go, don’t burn your fingers.
If I think about it, I rarely reread what I wrote to anyone or what they wrote to me and the suffocation that should plague me is the lack of security that there are others supporting me, that life has a backup. The strange thing is that I have lost an important piece of my memory and I DON’T FEEL ANYTHING. And how scary. But what peace too. I almost feel like I’m floating.
