Wallpaper
I pick up my phone and look at the time. It’s about 8:30-ish. I glance over the battery level of my earbuds (they’re aging, so the battery runs out quicker than it used to) and look at my little Reminders widget. It says ‘All Reminders Completed’, but that’s because I haven’t put anything in there in a long time. The phone screen blinks off again, since I perpetually have it on Low Power Mode. I don’t know why — it’s just become a habit. Whether it’s at 98% or 9%, there’s never a moment where the little battery icon will not be a leering banana-yellow chunk of color at the corner of my screen. It’s not big enough to stand out from the monochrome background though.
See, my phone wallpaper is solid black. Pure midnight, quite literally no different than if it had been turned off. Only the thin, arching white lines of the numbers cut through the inky expanse. To me, it forms a pleasing contrast — easy on the eyes, clear to see from afar, and not dramatic either. Simple, effective, and not distracting.
I guess you could say it’s quite dismal, too.
But it’s not like I’ve never had colorful wallpapers. If I go back to the very first wallpaper I made on this phone, I would be greeted with a sly grin from a cartoon Kronk, with the unlocked homepage wallpaper being a colorful 80s style record player and fern panorama. The next one is a lock screen full of the ramen emoji, and the unlocked background a ‘Caution: Wet Floor’ sign on a floatation device in the middle of a pool. Yes, it’s kitschy and so very typical of that quirky, meme-y middle school humor, but sue me. I was in middle school when I made those — and it’s not like you, dear reader, were immune from being cringe in middle school either. It’s part of the human experience, I believe. Even if I look back at it now and judge, it still was what the me from that time thought was funny — so much so that I chose to look at it every single day. It counts as a snapshot of what I thought was most important to me when I was making it.
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Scrolling through some of the other wallpapers I made a bit after that, I notice that a lot of them have a sort of striving trendiness, like I was trying too hard to be ‘aesthetic’. I’m suddenly reminded of my ‘wild child’ days, when the flavor of newly-acquired freedom danced across my tongue. I blew off homework too easily, made friends too quickly, fell asleep in class too often, and laughed too loudly about things I wouldn’t even dream of thinking about to myself. I wanted to fit in, to be ‘in’ with not the popular group, but the even more coveted cool group. Wildly memeable wallpapers like a Megamind screenshot with anime eyes photoshopped onto it (also saying uwu) reigned over this era, occasionally interjected with the filtered-too-much aesthetic photos of random gas stations and power lines.
I keep swiping and come across some of the more emotionally impactful wallpapers. A goofy photo of my younger self smiling at the camera, a moody black and white shot of the nighttime New York skyline, a dreamy, satin-like lavender cloudscape just barely revealing a miniscule half moon, and a bold cherry jello-red abstract photo taken from the World of Coke are some of my best works. Others are pilfered from the internet, screenshotted and paraded around as being ‘oh so aesthetic’. Each one of them are tied to a particular mood, a particular spur-of-the-moment mood shift that led to weeks of glancing at the new wallpaper in satisfaction, until I once again decided it was time for a change. Sporadic and entirely original — nothing can quite keep up to with the whims of teenage interests.
I’ve never been good with processing time, but my memories from these years are especially fragmented. Each one appears in my mind like a flash of the camera, as if the memories were stored in the glare of the light itself rather than the photo product of it. They’re all so potent with all different types of emotions: fear of the unknown, excitement at the new, anger towards things I thought were unfair and sadness towards what I thought I had lost. The memories prick at my eyes, leaving spots behind in my vision. Yes, I had been clouded by my ego and more than a bit judgmental at that time. I did and said things I wasn’t proud of, and I fell on my face quite a bit. However, I was happy, in my own ignorant way. I believed I was the center of the world, and it felt glorious. Extreme highs and extreme lows marked my experiences, which probably contributed to the wide and sometimes incongruous variety of my wallpapers. At times a dismal gray, at times a blurry picture of me cosplaying as a frat boy, at times a handmade wallpaper of my favorite line from a song, and at times a random lizard on the ceiling of my garage — whichever way, it was the feeling attached to that period of time that prompted me to select that particular photo as my wallpaper.
I wouldn’t say I miss being younger. I’ve definitely grown up a lot, and I’m thankful for all my experiences, no matter how hard they’ve been on me. I’m mostly thankful that I’ve gotten to experience all that I have, because it shows that I’ve evolved as a person. The art of introspection is not unfamiliar to me, but when I really started looking at who I was as a person, I realized how much our experiences and our mindsets shape our interests, aesthetic or otherwise. Every photo I put as a wallpaper was tied to some part of me that was engraved into those pixels. I won’t get back the person I was at that point in time, but neither do I want to. Just looking back at everything and watching my evolution like some sort of meta-psychological Darwin is good enough for me.
I glance at the time once more — it’s now approaching 9:30. I’m back to my all-black wallpaper, watching my reflection on the screen protector. I originally set this wallpaper at one of the lower points in my life, where I didn’t even have the energy to think about being colorful or quirky. While I don’t quite feel that way anymore, I guess you could say it’s become a habit. Looking at the plain pitch-black background doesn’t invoke any type of feeling in me — without me noticing, it had become as natural to me as the deep brown in my irises or the white crescents on my nails.
I know I’ll probably look back on this one day and reflect on what it says about me. For now, though, I think I’ve spent way too much time describing the different wallpapers I have saved on my phone.
