Why oh why, why on Earth am I still playing the charade of doing basically all my web surfing on incognito/private mode? It made sense maybe ten years ago, when I realized I was using my browsing history to trace my every move online just to remember what I was doing on a certain day—probably an anxiety-induced frenzy. I decided to go full incognito in an effort to kill that urge, or at least the possibility to fulfill it. So now I go on opening tab after tab after tab because it will help me remember that I will need this later, as if an open tab were an item in a to-do list, until months later something insignificant happens and boom, in an instant all the tabs are gone forever. And then I feel like half my brain and life history have blown up in smithereens, because I absolutely cannot remember what any of those tabs contained, but surely they were really important, otherwise why would I leave them up like that, and their presence there must have conveyed something about who I was and what I was doing and thinking about back then (when?), and earlier than that, like a slice of earth and its rock layers.
This particular batch of tabs, the one I’m mourning right now, feels like I’ve just lost some souvenirs from a wonderful trip. Lord knows the real loss was exponentially worse. Still, the real memories of recent marvelous travels remain intact, as does the joy of them happening.
I told Cavorite while we brushed our teeth that I had a bunch of old tabs close on me.
“Good!” he said.
“Cold water is healthy,” I replied, “but it’s still a bucket of cold water.”