Fwd: 2/15

i'm thankful that after switching to the big dumb android phone i hate, i started using google photos to share pictures easily between my phone and ipad and computer after not having (consciously) used a cloud-based option for a long time because i loved the manual intentional ritual of doing an airdrop when i had an iphone, the framing of "transmission" where i hit a button on the phone and the UI lags and then it pops up and makes a sound on my computer screen, and i'm thankful, as someone who doesn't use facebook and get its "[n] years ago" commemorations, google photos (which apparently has been slurping up my photos for years without me intentionally sending them, which is not great but honestly i don't care) provides those and so i'm thankful that yesterday, i opened google photos to find a screenshot i had taken the other day and was presented with images from five, three, and one year ago, and i'm thankful that the five year ago one was of d and i in the park near our apartment in bloomington on a very snowy winter day, her smiling out under the fur hood of her heavy coat, and i'm thankful that the three years ago was the trip we had taken to knoxville to visit her friend a and ridden in go karts and played putt putt and i'm thankful that the image from one year ago was, i could tell almost instantly of the wings at pok pok, which we ate on our first trip to portland during what was the absolute worst time of my life (i remember thinking this sentence over and over during the weekend, "this is the worst day of my life" and then it would just get worse) where d was suddenly a different person and we were in different realities and there seemed to be no way at all for us to climb back into the bond which had felt so permanent and comforting for so long (so many photos over so many years) and i have never been a person who thinks about the distant future much, which had always been a difference between d and i, but suddenly i had lost all faith that the future i thought was automatic would happen at all and i just saw a big dark nothing in front of us and anyway i'm thankful that though that was a very bad time, the absolute worst time in my life, we're both doing great now and doing great together.