The Last Analog Summer
The Last Analog Summer
I didn't realize it was the last summer without a phone until years later, when I found the shoebox.
It was wedged behind a collapsed shelf in my parents' garage, sandwiched between a box of VHS tapes nobody had rewound and a broken badminton set that still smelled like cut grass. Inside: 47 photographs, loose. No album, no order. Just a pile of moments that had never been uploaded anywhere, never compressed, never tagged.
I was 13 that summer. My sister Nadia was 16 and too old for me, or thought she was. We lived in a suburb that felt designed by someone who had read about suburbs but never visited one — cul-de-sacs that dead-ended into drainage ditches, a community pool that closed in July for structural repairs, a strip mall anchored by a Blockbuster that was already quietly dying.
We were bored in the specific way that only that era could manufacture. Not the bored-with-infinite-content feeling I see in kids today, where everything is available and nothing lands. This was bored-bored. Waiting-for-something bored. The kind of boredom that has texture.
So we invented things to do.
Nadia and I and the three kids from the cul-de-sac — Marcus, and the twins whose names I always write as Jessie-and-Priya because I can't remember ever thinking of them separately — we built a whole economy out of nothing. We charged neighborhood dogs ten minutes of petting as currency. We made a newspaper, two issues, photocopied at the library for eleven cents a sheet. We convinced ourselves that the storm drain behind the Walgreens was the entrance to something, and spent a week daring each other to go in further.
None of it was remarkable. That's the point.
A midsummer nights eve
In one of the photographs, Nadia is standing in the driveway eating a popsicle, squinting into the sun. She's wearing a shirt I remember her wearing constantly that summer, yellow with a small iron-on transfer that had started to crack. She is not posing. She didn't know someone was taking the picture. Her weight is on one foot, the other knee slightly bent, her whole body arranged in that teenage posture that says I am here but not necessarily by choice.
I stared at that photo for a long time in the cold garage.
The thing that got me wasn't nostalgia, exactly. It was more like noticing an absence I hadn't named before. In every photograph from that summer, nobody is looking at a phone. Not because we were being present or intentional or any of the words we use now to describe the deliberate avoidance of screens. We just didn't have them. That was the whole shape of that time. The empty space in our hands meant something.
I'm not going to tell you it was better. I don't think that's true. I have a GPS now, and it has saved me from myself dozens of times. I can call my mother from anywhere. I read things I never would have found. I found my apartment, my job, my partner through the phone or something connected to it.
But I will say this: that summer had a slowness that I don't know how to replicate. Long afternoons that didn't fracture. Boredom that didn't immediately route around itself. The feeling of waiting for something — a friend to show up, a plan to materialize, a storm to break — without anything else to do while you waited except wait.
I put the photos back in the shoebox. I didn't scan them.
I've thought about that decision since. Part of it was laziness. Part of it was something else — a feeling that uploading them would change them in some way I couldn't quite articulate. That they would enter a different state of existence. Indexed, searchable, permanent in a new way that the original 4x6 prints never were.
There is a version of those photographs that exists only in a shoebox in a garage in a suburb that still smells faintly like cut grass. That version can be lost in a flood or a fire. It is contingent and fragile and slightly out of focus in the upper left corner.
I think I wanted to leave it that way.