I’m Running Out Of Pictures To Post
By: Jennifer Elise
Tags: Siblings, Viktor Frankl, Memoir, Meaning Of Life, Existence

I’m running out of pictures to post because the years tick by and I’m left with only the almost-nineteen year collection from way back in the times before we carried all our photos in our palm in an easy-to-access catalogue of our lives.

I’m running out of pictures to post because the thought of going to mom’s and digging through the printed memories feels too big because the boxes of your short-life reel are paradoxically larger than my longer-life palm-size reel of all the things that happened after you.

I’m running out of pictures to post because your time on earth was brief and you lived before the social media pictorial of the self each person now has immediately at hand so that when they leave this world the evidence of their existence is sealed in the permanence of the endless electronic space cloud.

I’m running out of pictures to post unsure whether to laugh or cry over the concept of what it now means to live in the eternal electronic cloud when for so long I’ve imagined you on your own eternal (non-electronic) cloud in the company of all the others who came before the palm-sized life reels which solidify our existence here on earth as an electronic footprint impossible to erase.

I’m running out of pictures to post but never at a loss for words to describe or things to say about what it feels like to be running out of pictures and self-conscious of the fact that I’ve had two consecutive days of memorial word vomit (even after 27 years and even though I tell others that there is no timeline but somehow still get myself stuck there) which I feel compelled to share with the world as a way of including you in the electronic cloud and drawing you into the fold of eternal presence because somehow the essence of electronic life implies a permanence that you and those who came before you in those primitive print-reel times will never have.

I’m running out of pictures to post because you never had a Facebook page or an Instagram account or Tik-Tok-ed a video of the real-life episode of yourself being stuffed into the trunk of a friend’s car which is a memory only experienced by a select few who downloaded (or is it uploaded since I’m of the age where I don’t understand the difference between loading a file up or down?) the memory verbally with the others who loved and cared for you so that they might absorb that memory as proof-of-life evidence that you existed and are carried on through figurative time and space which in this day and age feels so much less tangible than the proof-of-life-palm-sized reel.

I’m running out of pictures to post and feeling terrified that you’re fading along with the finite set of printed photos in those boxes which if I only had the strength to scan could become your own electronic life-reel on the social media platform of my choice or even all of them because there are no rules about how many platforms we can use to plant our electronic seeds and memorialize ourselves across space and time and clouds.

I’m running out of pictures to post and gob-smacked that you’d be 46 while starting to think of you as that tree falling in the woods with no one there to bear witness to its sound as it falls lost in the existential vacuum of what it means to be here or to have been here or to continue being here since for me even without electronic proof-of-life you are here and were here and will always be here suspended in time in my mind in an actual cloud like the ethereal one described by so many before me and the one I carry in my heart along with Frankl’s concept of angels lost in contemplation of an infinite glory which is an idea too beautiful for an electronic cloud and too other-worldly in its essence which is exactly as you will always remain to me as I keep you eternally embedded in my soul.