The Only Thing My Phone Won't Let Me Delete

My phone's storage has been full for a while now, and every time that warning pops up, I go looking for something to delete. An old app. A screenshot I don't need. A video I forgot I even recorded. But this time, there was nothing left to give up — because almost everything on my phone is sunsets, sunrises, and clouds. Not a few. Not a handful I could sort through in five minutes. Countless.

I don't remember deciding to become someone who does this. It just happened. Whenever I get the chance — walking somewhere, standing on the terrace, stuck at a red light — if the sky looks like something, I take out my phone. Then I stand there for a good minute or two, looking at the photo I just took, turning it slightly, zooming in on the colours, as if I were some serious photographer reviewing a shoot. I'm not. I just really like the sky.

What surprised me is what happens when I scroll back to these photos a year or two later. I expected to feel nothing — old photos usually just sit there, unremarkable, waiting to be deleted. But these do something different. There's a strange, specific peace that shows up when I look at a sunset I photographed two years ago. I don't always remember where I was or what was happening that day. I just remember that the sky looked like that, and for a few seconds, it still does something to me.

So when my storage runs out and I have to choose what goes, the choice is always the same. WhatsApp goes. Instagram goes. Some app I installed for one task and never opened again — gone, no hesitation. But the moment I try to delete even one sunset photo, something in me resists. It's a small, strange unease, almost out of proportion to what it actually is — just a photo of a sky. I've had these images sitting untouched in my gallery for two, sometimes three years, surviving every single clean-up.

I think it's because these photos don't ask anything of me. I didn't take them for anyone. There's no caption to write, no one to notify, nothing to check back on. They're not performing for anybody — not even for me, really. They're just proof that I stopped, for a moment, and looked up.

So the apps keep disappearing from my phone, one clean-up at a time. The sunsets stay. And honestly, I don't think that's going to change anytime soon.