When the City Decided to Archive Us
The city announced it would begin deleting yesterday.
Not metaphorically.
Not in the way cities usually do, by erecting glass over brick.
This time it was procedural.
At midnight, every memory older than twenty-four hours would be compressed into a municipal file and sealed.
We were given instructions.
Please retrieve sentimental attachments.
Please export grief into acceptable formats.
Please clear emotional cache before curfew.
At first, no one panicked.
We have always lived half inside notification,
half inside erasure.
But the next morning,
the bakery did not remember burning.
The river did not recall flooding.
My neighbor introduced herself twice.
The city was lighter.
Arguments evaporated mid-sentence.
Apologies dissolved before landing.
Even the air felt recently laundered.
The mayor called it civic renewal.
A fresh-start economy.
Couples began timing their fights.
Meet at 11:37 p.m.
Confess at 11:54.
Break at 11:58.
Let nothing survive the hour.
Children stopped fearing mistakes.
What is shame if it cannot last?
What is consequence if it cannot linger?
I tried to resist.
I kept a receipt from the day you left.
The cracked cup we fought over.
The sound of your laugh snagging on my name.
At 12:01 a.m., they thinned to static in my hands.
I began writing directly onto my skin.
Dates along my forearm.
Coordinates behind my knees.
Every word you once said when you meant it.
By dawn,
the ink had paled into nothing.
The city does not permit permanence.
Now I walk through streets that do not accuse me.
No ghosts.
No backlog of regret.
No sediment of before.
It is supposed to be merciful.
But I miss the weight of yesterday.
The drag of it.
The way memory made the present accountable.
Tonight, at 11:59,
I will refuse compression.
I will speak every name I have ever known.
I will list every failure.
I will confess love too slowly to be archived.
Let the servers choke.
Let the files corrupt.
Let the system stall on my insistence.
If goodbye must be mandatory,
I will make it heavy.
I will make it unerasable.
I will make it hurt long enough
to prove it happened.
Pravy Jha is a student writer from India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brilliant Flash Fiction, Last Syllable Literary Journal, Blue Marble Review, and anthologies such as Upon Learning That and Rooted In: Rite.
