Lamma Island, 11:30AM – Hazy.

Entry 82

Today, I export all my files, but not in the way you might think.

Four plastic boxes full of journals and travelogues under my bed. Memories stored in a physical cloud. This whole time I have been sleeping on a cloud.

I borrow a cart from the village shop and push my memories downhill to the post office. Temptation lets me flick through two journals, one from 2008, and the other from a decade later. Worlds apart. Chongqing, China: complaints regarding a Chinese textbook being full of cultural propaganda. Chinese people say their surnames first because they value family over the individual. I was 16 and furious. Yōga, Tokyo: erotic descriptions of fellow patrons at a (non-erotic) bathhouse, something called a sentō. I was married and lost.

Downloading your life from the physical cloud takes time. It’s as if you are waiting for the memory to notice you first from across a crowded room, waiting for the moment it turns its head, nods, starts walking toward you, coming over to check you out from behind the glass.

It is probably the most expensive file transfer I will ever carry out, and what with global shipping being backed up, and the quality of the Hong Kong Post boxes being bran cereal, the least certain. On the customs form I have to declare a value. That is tricky but I manage to put something down.