new and more

When you lose someone, you always have them with you. But what you lose is new things about them, new memories with them, new conversations. And you lose more: more time together, learning more about each other, having more ideas and doing more. 

In that first season after losing someone, you relish every story told about them from friends and family because it feels like new and more. You soak in every new photograph you find of them. 

But when it's been almost nine years, those moments don't come as often anymore. 

So much so that when my mom asked Nate to clear off some of Dad's old hard drives, it ended up becoming a much more meaningful experience for me. 

I think most of the files on the hard drives were things that I'd seen before or had no real interest in (random shoots he'd done). But what I loved was just looking at the names of the files, the way he had organized them. It was like getting to be in his brain for a few minutes, his brain that couldn't spell to save his life and who saved the most random images and projects. 

It was so tiny, just files titles. 

But it was new and it was more.