Without Nostalgia

The old hard drive is here - "old" is relative, five years maybe? - but finding the adapter, and the cable, is a bit trickier. One's in the closet, the other hiding under a pile of unfiled paperwork.

But once they're both out, the portal to the past is opened, and pieces of plastic and metal, wires and magnetic media, are transformed into memories, old songs, pictures of people I'd forgotten, movies I haven't watched in years, a version of me that only exists in ones and zeros. 

I scroll through, without nostalgia, like an anthropologist looking at a case study of a person who hasn't lived for hundreds of years.