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My backup storage was full.
Pay extra? Pff, that's for lazy people.
Last week, I finally had a brilliant idea.
It turned out into a terrible mistake.

In around half an hour,
I lost all the pictures
from the last 5 years.

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A deep sense of sadness and frustration
grew inside of me, out of the hole left from
those 18 thousands pieces of memory.

After some minutes spent between denial and desperation,
I checked in within myself: how did I really feel about it?

A very clear thought surprised me: "who cares?"

I realised that
below the surface
I was indeed quite calm.

I felt light(er).
In the end,
I lived all those moments.
I took all those pictures.
They were somewhere
inside of me.

I only really missed one picture.

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I read once the story of a man,
who received as a gift a red jacket.
The friend who gifted it to him
said that red suited him very well;
he thought, instead,
that red was just too
colorful and "loud" for him,
and decided not to wear it.

One day, some months later,
about to leave for a trip across the mountains,
he couldn't find his favourite jacket.
Already late, he decided to bring the red one instead.

A couple of hours later,
his helicopter had an accident
and he found himself, the only survivor,
roaming around the freezing mountain,
hoping that somebody would arrive to rescue him.
A rescue party indeed arrived,
and they would later say that through the storm,
they only managed to locate him
thanks to his bright colorful red jacket.

He would tell that what he really learned
was to never fear of being colorful or loud or alive,
because that's exactly who we should strive to be:
our full and bright selves.

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There is one caveat to the story of
how I lost all my pictures.

Thanks to some weird backup setting
I didn't even remember about,
the ones that I shared via whatsapp,
either sent or received,
were still there.
It felt Life (or maybe just Google)
were teaching me a valuable lesson there:
joy is only real when shared, so do memories.

Of more than 18 thousands pictures,
I only really missed one.

Of myself.

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I strongly dislike selfies.
I do agree with a comedian
who said that, instead of selfies,
they should be called "lonelies".
In a world obsessed with oneself,
I committed to only take pictures of me
in very extraordinary moments.

In the course of the years,
this idea cemented in a very specific habit:
I take a picture of myself when
I'm extremely happy.

A couple of days before THE incident,
I was on the ferry, coming back
to Athens from a nearby island.
While the warm sun was shining on my face,
waiting for the huge doors to open
and for the city to embrace us again,
I sat for a second and looked outside the opaque window.
I felt radiant.

I took a picture of myself.

I felt happy,
and beautiful,
and full of joy.

Still, who could I share it with?
It would have been
too "loud",
too pretentious,
too much.

So I didn't.
And that's why
it was part
of the ones
that got deleted.

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What I learned is that
we should not be afraid of
our light, and joy, and love.
We must look at the brightest parts of our soul
with affection and admiration,
because they belong to us as much as the
darkest ones we also tend to hide.
The silly shiny sides of us,
do not weight any less than our
serious measured ones.

I also learned
that we are our memories,
we lived them and breathed them,
so we must go through life
with presence and attention.

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When you close
your eyes,
at night,
smile.
You lived so much
beauty and joy and happiness,
already.
And much more,
is awaiting you.

You are your memory,
and not the picture of it,
not an image of it,
but the real living thing.