The Notification

The phone said: memories from fourteen years ago.

I tapped it while clearing storage,

trying to get a few gigabytes back.

The photo was a kitchen floor.

Linoleum, the kind with fake grout lines

pressed into the pattern.

An orange two-liter on its side,

cap missing,

a dark sticky ring where it had been standing.

That's all that was in the frame.

I was seventeen.

Someone's older brother's apartment.

I remember the orange being specific—

not the logo orange, more faded,

like the bottle had been in a car for a while.

I closed the photo.

Opened it again.

The people from that night

are mostly gone from me now—

not estranged, just gone

the way a room clears out

and you stop tracking where everyone went.

The linoleum. The two-liter.

The ring on the floor.

I deleted seven hundred photos that afternoon.

I kept that one.

I'm not sure what I thought I was keeping.