Wild Internet Archive — Days Of Being

When it finished, he created a new folder on his desktop. He named it the best nights of our whole stupid lives . Then he went to bed, and for the first time in twenty-three years, he dreamed of a bonfire, and a laugh he could almost hear, and a boy who never got to be wild past the age of nineteen.

“Leo, you idiot, stop filming the fire and film me,” Cass’s voice said, tinny and alive.

The search results were the usual corpses. A Wikipedia entry. A fan forum from 2005 discussing Leslie Cheung’s wardrobe. A dead link to a now-defunct streaming site. But tonight, deep on the fourth page—a place no normal human goes—he saw it. days of being wild internet archive

He wasn’t looking for the Wong Kar-wai film. He had the Criterion Blu-ray. He was looking for his days of being wild. The ones he’d uploaded, carelessly, to a GeoCities angelfire page in 1999. Back when "being wild" meant filming himself and his friends jumping off the roof of the abandoned textile mill into a pile of leaves, the footage grainy and stuttering, scored to a CD-ROM rip of "Song 2" by Blur.

The video ended. The screen went black.

Leo clicked play. The video was shaky, vertical (before vertical was a sin). Cass was holding the camera at arm's length, walking backwards.

“Good,” Cass said. He stopped walking and looked directly into the lens. The firelight caught the edge of his jaw. “Then forever from now, you’ll remember that this was the best night of our whole stupid lives.” When it finished, he created a new folder on his desktop

The files were there. All of them. The folder names were misspelled, all lowercase, full of teenage bravado: skate_park_fail/ , mall_ninja_movie/ , new_years_1999_cam/ . The last modified dates were from 2001. Two years after he’d uploaded them. Someone had scraped GeoCities before the great digital landfill collapse of 2009.