Cycle I · “The Hidden Voice” · 22

She has a folder she lies to herself about.

Not on her main camera roll — deeper. Buried behind a fake app name, double passcode, “just in case I ever need it.”

Inside:

screenshots of chats that once made her feel important,

a couple of photos she sent that she can’t believe she was brave enough to take,

and one or two things someone else sent her that she never had the courage to delete.

She tells herself they’re:

Reference,
Proof,
Backup.

Some nights, they’re comfort.

Other nights, they feel like a crime scene.

Reading this piece, she feels a weird mix of exposed and relieved. The line that hits hardest isn’t about tech mining data. It’s:

“I am not one to keep ‘receipts’ of my interactions with those who are no longer in my life.”

She can’t make anyone else do that.

She doesn’t know who still has her saved on some old device or hidden cloud.

But she can feel something shift around the idea that she’s obligated to keep them:

Old lovers,
Near-strangers,
Former almost-dynamics,

all sitting in her phone like they still have a claim on her.

She doesn’t go on a mass purge. Not yet.

Instead, she picks one thread — the one that hurts the most when she scrolls it — and holds her thumb over the delete button long enough for her heart to race.

Then she taps.

There’s no dramatic music. No instant lightness. Just a quiet, almost imperceptible sense that one tiny piece of her has finally been allowed to stop existing in someone else’s story.

She plugs her phone in for the night and thinks, for the first time:

“Maybe I’m allowed to forget some things on purpose.”

It’s not a jump across worlds.

But it’s a start.

Cycle I · “The Hidden Voice” · 22

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