Turn 8 of 12

Get up and delete the _old_old folder

You sit up. The duvet falls off your shoulders and the cold hits immediately — your chest, your arms, the backs of your knees where the bed had been keeping you warm. The laptop is on the desk, three steps away, shut but not off, the little power light pulsing slowly like something breathing in its sleep.

You open the lid. The screen wakes. rewrite.exe is not running — you closed it, you remember closing it — but the _old_old folder is sitting on your desktop in exactly the place you left it, the icon a standard yellow folder with a name that suggests history and a creation date that suggests yesterday. You right-click. The context menu offers delete in the usual place, seventh from the top, between cut and rename. Your cursor hovers on it.

You think about what you are deleting. Not the program — the program is an .exe, compiled, opaque, a black box you could download again if you knew where to look, which you don't. You are deleting the folder that appeared on your desktop without your permission, that knew your contacts before you typed them, that had a record for your best friend detailed enough to include his childhood scars and his mood baseline and a decimal for his average hours of sleep. You are deleting the container, not the contents. The contents are already in your head.

You click delete. Windows asks if you want to move the folder to the Recycle Bin, and you click yes, and the folder vanishes from the desktop with the small, unsatisfying pop of a standard animation. The desktop is clean now. Wallpaper, a few folders, the recycling bin with its newly full icon. You empty the Recycle Bin too, because you know how Windows works, because you are a developer and you know that delete is not delete until the bin is empty, and the bin empties with the same small animation and the icon goes flat again and the folder is gone.

You close the laptop. The power light pulses. You stand there in the dark in your pants, cold, staring at the closed lid of a machine that still has the program on its hard drive somewhere — because emptying the Recycle Bin removes the file pointer, not the data, and you know this, and you know that anyone with the right tools could recover it in fifteen minutes, and you know that the knowledge sits in your head now like a splinter you cannot reach. The folder is deleted. The program is not. The screen is dark. The room is cold. You get back into bed and pull the duvet to your chin and the ceiling is still orange and the fox is still silent and the problems are still unsolved.

The phone buzzes on the desk. You don't reach for it. You lie in the dark and listen to it buzz twice more and go quiet, and somewhere down the hall Saanvi's alarm is four hours closer to going off, and you are four hours closer to sitting across from her at the kitchen table pretending you are the same person you were yesterday.