It was the third night in a row that Lucía woke up at 3:17 a.m., clutching her phone.
One night, she found herself crying not for the lost images, but for the lost versions of herself. The Lucía who had been carefree enough to snort-laugh. The Lucía who had baked bread from scratch during a lonely winter. The Lucía who had stood on that cliff and believed, genuinely believed, that life would always feel that wide and blue.
Lucía smiled. She picked up the phone, went to settings, and deleted the backup entirely.
Those Lucías are not dead , she whispered into her pillow. They just have no more evidence. mis fotos borradas ox imagenes mias
She wrote the taste of the gum on the Menorca cliff. She wrote the sound of her grandmother’s slippers on the kitchen tile. She wrote the exact temperature of the tattoo needle against her ribcage—not cold, not hot, but a kind of electric hum. She wrote the names of people whose faces she could no longer summon. She wrote the joke that had made her snort-laugh (something about a penguin and a broken refrigerator). She wrote the flour on her cheek and how, for ten minutes, she had refused to wipe it off because it made her feel like someone who knew how to live.
At first, the grief was absurdly physical. A hollow ache behind her ribs. She found herself opening her gallery reflexively—waiting for the bus, lying in bed, hiding in the bathroom at a party—only to encounter the void. The thumbnails were grey squares with a sad little cloud icon. Recover? No. Not possible.
The first week, she tried to reconstruct. She texted friends: Do you still have that photo from the rooftop bar? Most replied with broken links or shrugged emojis. People had switched phones twice since then. Her mother sent a low-resolution version of a family Christmas, but Lucía’s face was blurred, mid-sneeze. It was the third night in a row
On the last page, she wrote a letter to her future self:
If you ever lose your photos again—by accident, by theft, by fire, by a stupid click of a button—do not panic. Do not mourn the grey squares. Close your eyes. Go to the cliff. Feel the wind. Taste the gum. Laugh until you snort. The pictures were never the real thing. You are.
It had started as a clumsy accident. Two weeks earlier, she’d been cleaning up her iCloud storage—screenshots, memes, blurry videos of concerts. She’d selected what she thought was a folder of duplicates and hit “Delete All.” It wasn’t until the next morning, when she went looking for a picture of her late grandmother’s handwriting, that she realized the truth. The Lucía who had baked bread from scratch
She closed the notebook and set it on her nightstand. Beside it, her phone buzzed with a notification: iCloud storage almost full. Upgrade now?
Then she turned off the screen, rolled over, and for the first time in weeks, slept without dreaming of empty white squares.
By page thirty, the hollow ache had filled with something else. A strange, tender warmth. She realized that the photos had been a kind of cage. A fixed, frozen version of events that had stopped her from remembering fully . The camera had chosen one square. But her mind held the whole sky.
The screen glowed blue in the dark. She had been dreaming of the sea—of a specific cliff on the coast of Menorca where, five years ago, she had felt truly happy. In the dream, she was looking at photos from that trip on her phone. But when she tried to swipe to the next image, every picture turned white. Empty. Deleted.