I’m on minute twenty-one of waiting for the app’s operation to finish. Despite my phone’s 128 gigabytes of storage — which I had considered massive for, oh, about two days — I now have to clear out a whole bunch of the photos from the previous two years if I want to be able to take any more.

True to my pack-rat nature, I am resisting this whole process. I hate having to delete anything from any device, even though the rational part of my brain is reminding me that I have a backup of the backup of the backup of everything on my phone. Maybe it’s a deep-seated insecurity, that if I don’t carry these photos around with me, eventually I’ll lose track of them, just like I have for the hundreds upon thousands of photos I took in high school, college, and the first few years of my filmmaking life.

And yet those years are hardly lost. The parts that I want to remember, I’ve managed to save some memento of: the plane tickets, the movie stubs, the souvenir programs and autographed knick-knacks, and the physical and metaphorical trophies of various sizes and forms. And the most cherished moments live most vividly in the memories of those who shared them with me.

Repeat after me: deleting photos of your son is not the same as deleting those months from his life.

I suppose I should have more faith in the human brain. It knows which moments must be saved, and which, if I’m being honest, are just taking up extra space.

(Meanwhile, I’ve stopped the app from deleting the entire mass of photos. It was taking too long and, well… it can wait.)