Why I’m Scared of Deleting Texts

One of the biggest lies we tell ourselves is that things last forever. We make bracelets with our BFFs in grade school, until we inevitably lose them (the friend and the bracelet). We dance through never-ending Friday nights, only to be interrupted by reality the next morning. After all, "forever" is a word for something that doesn't seem to exist. Growing up, I understood this, manifested by my utter obsession with documentation. I feared that if I didn't write it down or save it, it would disappear into oblivion.

The first time I texted a boy — with this shiny purple phone that lit up on its sides — I wrote the thread down in a diary. Here's a snippet: "Do you have a girlfriend?" I texted, hoping for a denial. "It's you," the boy fired back. I sheepishly grinned in the back of the car and gazed out the window (a true rom-com moment, I told myself). 

I cringe thinking about this now. Why did I feel the need to bookmark this moment? To be ingrained in my mind, firmly attached to any fleeting thought as far back as my awkward middle school days. 

I remember passing notes with another boy during English class, sometime later. He was turning around to place a new note on my desk when our teacher caught him, demanding to see the note. You’d never guess what happened next — the boy popped the note in his mouth and swallowed it. My knight in shining armor. Sacrificing his health and dignity to protect a silly little conversation. After that episode, we became a little more than friends — the crumbled notes turned into midnight texts and trips to the mall after school. At our last class gathering before I moved halfway across the world, I asked to see all the notes he saved over the years.

I never got them — he kissed another girl that day, and we stopped talking. Still, even now, I will happily give up anything to have the notes: a brief relationship that felt like the world to me at age 13, preserved in pristine condition.

In high school, I had my first real breakup. We went to different schools, and without cars between the two of us, it was the equivalent of living across the nation. Right person, wrong time, I told myself, when I knew it ran deeper than that. Remnants of our relationship now live safely in my phone’s screenshots folder, screenshots that me and my closest group chats once discussed at length. Why did the two gigabytes of our iMessage thread feel more real than the bracelet he gifted me for Valentine’s day? And why, long after we broke up, couldn’t I bring myself to delete them with a simple swipe and reverse the permanence of it all? 

Somehow, conversations felt more and more real over the internet. I couldn't delete a single text message unless prompted by that dreaded “Your phone has ran out of storage” notification. I convinced myself that the text threads I saved over the years were my very own time capsule — a living archive of past relationships I couldn't get back, no matter how hard I tried to remember. Our memory is distorted by the colors we saw and the feelings we felt in the moment, but our text threads aren’t. Our conversations live here, waiting to be reread, savored, and cried out, many times over. 

I don’t mean to be a digital hoarder or overdramatize my coming-of-age relationships. Blame the rom-coms that have shaped my girlhood more than I’d like to admit, or this media-crazed generation. But the truth is, when I accidentally scroll up in a conversation with a friend I haven’t talked to in a year, I reminisce about the time we played paper.io in the yearbook room. The time when our biggest problem was deciding who to invite to our prom group. The time we planned to get boba on a rainy Saturday. I considered these moments, the nostalgic b-roll of lost friendships, and wondered how anyone could deem them worthy of being erased. 

I once heard that some people we meet are only meant to stay for a season. When they leave, either suddenly or gradually, we feel broken because we genuinely thought they were going to stay with us for longer, if not a lifetime. I’ve lived through several big moves in my life, becoming all too familiar with goodbyes, but I still wasn’t prepared for the strange transition between high school and college. Those we used to text everyday, those we spent four years in a rundown high school with, now dispersed across the country like monarchs in migration. When, if, we meet again, what is there to talk about but the times we spent together? “Remember when…” we would say, with an inexplicable kind of understanding that only comes with shared nostalgia. 

We love to swear by deleting texts with ex-friends and lovers, but by doing so, we overlook the warmth they evoke, years later, when we’ve moved on to different people and bigger things in life. I revisit our old messages like clockwork, letters from the past memorializing the little conversations we once used to get through our days. 

As the future becomes more unknown, living in the past is a form of escapism, soothing to the soul only if done right. Sometimes, a digital cleanse after leaving a toxic relationship is what we need to move forward. Other times, keeping text threads is just a fun way to document thoughts and chats from another season of life. To collect and romanticize our growing-up stories in the most Gen-Z way possible, for as long as we can. 

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Photography by Noah Boykin