#100.

Ever since phones started spitting out good images, I’ve been storing memories into servers and screens, into the accidental black hole of an erased hard drive.

Once upon a time, hobbies had weight. A CD you could slip into your pocket, a yellow, brittle book, cassettes waiting to be rewound with a pencil. Tangible, holdable objects. Your passion could live in your pocket, your backpack, your hands. It could be shared through hands.

I’m holding a photo of me and my family, twenty-four years ago. The colors have curdled a little yellow, time smudging its fingerprints. Four smiles looking back at me, a good day. 

Everyone in my family knows this picture exists; everyone knows I have it.

It has become an emotional landmark, the way a grandmother’s wedding dish becomes a landmark, passed down woman to woman, almost religious.

Do you understand?

I turn it over, KODAK Royal Paper staring back at me and my mother’s handwriting inked across the back: June 2001.

This photo will not be duplicated for safekeeping, I am the safekeeper.

Do you understand?

Memory, when passed through an object, becomes ritualized.

There used to be a time when such memories were passed hand to hand, in a dim kitchen corner on Christmas Eve, my grandmother’s whisper, when I die, make sure your mother has this, pointing at some unremarkable dish. 

Except, of course, it is remarkable. Scaled white, what used to be gold finishes eroded from all of the memories of it I remember. This dish is two wars, four generations old.

I fear we are rapidly losing this part of humanity.

In the pursuit of making things cheaper and more accessible, we are making them weaker, too.

What will your great-great-granddaughter inherit from you? A Walmart two-for-one dish? 

I hold the photo tighter.

I know when my parents are gone, I will still be able to find them here, in the faded edges, our fingerprints layered one atop the other. If I close my eyes, I can almost feel their arms around me again.

In 2025, print pictures. Offer them to the people you love. If you lack an heirloom, make one. Pass it on. Don’t let capitalism steal your tangible memories.