Three times removed

Find­ing myself sur­roun­ded by index cards con­tain­ing intric­ate data, pock­marked for pos­ter­ity, scratch­ings of mean­ing­less fig­ures totalling a sum I can’t even com­pute, and end­less screeds of inform­a­tion doused in the mois­ture from both lov­ing and unlov­ing sighs, I begin the task of burn­ing the evid­ence they reveal. One hun­dred and twenty index cards every night, cremated bey­ond recog­ni­tion. I inhale the fumes, stick my tongue into the air to catch a dying ember. I com­mit the files to memory, ran­domly accessed. I plug myself in, back myself up to any clouds I can see, know­ing that my fin­gers are not long enough to reach nor flex­ible enough to grip and hold on. I spend vir­tual cash on cheapened lives. I invest irre­spons­ibly. I erase everything because, ulti­mately, I want to be refilled, cor­rup­ted and scrawled upon anew. And yet.