Fiction- Short Story

200 Gigabytes

I deleted it tonight.

Image by wirestock for Freepik

(Author’s note: This is a fictional story about sexual addiction, specifically to feet. Possible triggering effects, buyer beware.

I was drawn to something like this due to a different addiction I suffer from. Not feet; not sexual in any way. My need to categorize everything and have all my data just so.)

0.0 MB

The progress bar took eleven minutes to clear 200 gigabytes, which means the SSD in this laptop is underperforming by roughly a factor of four. I know this because I looked it up while it was running, which tells you something about the frame of mind I was in. Not frantic. Not relieved. Curious, in the way I get curious about things that don’t require my feelings to be in any particular order.

I am a chemist by training, which means I spent seven years in graduate school learning to describe processes with precision while remaining personally uninvolved in what those processes produced. I synthesize compounds at a contract research organization in Morris County, New Jersey. I have good health insurance. I drive a 2019 Camry with 44,000 miles on it. I am thirty-eight years old, and I have just deleted 200 gigabytes of podophilic content, and I am going to try to tell you what that means, or at least what it cost…