It was my brother Leo’s. For his fourteenth birthday in 2007, it was the ultimate status symbol. It wasn’t just an MP3 player; it was a slice of the future. A pocket-sized portal to the internet (via our painfully slow Wi-Fi), a games console, a video player. I, being his annoyingly admiring younger sister, was forbidden from even looking at it for the first six months.
But time moves on. iPhones got smarter, apps became everything, and Leo left for college, leaving the iPod Touch behind. It sat in that drawer for over a decade, a silent relic of a simpler digital age.
Its resurrection happened on a rainy Sunday. My Wi-Fi was down, my phone was dead, and I was bored. My hand rummaged through the junk drawer and closed around the familiar, cool rectangle. On a whim, I found its proprietary 30-pin charger, plugged it in, and held my breath.
A green battery icon, then the glowing Apple. It was alive.
The first thing that hit me was the music. Leo’s library was a perfect, uncut snapshot of 2008: Fall Out Boy’s “Sugar, We’re Goin Down,” Linkin Park, the angsty soundtrack of our teenage years. But it was the other stuff that truly pulled me in. This device hadn’t connected to the internet in ten years. It was a digital fossil, perfectly preserved.
I scrolled through his photos. Not the thousands of curated shots we take now, but 47 precious, grainy images. A blurry picture of our dog, now long gone. A shot of his first car, filled with his friends making silly faces. A screenshot of a high score on a game called Tap Tap Revenge.
Then I opened the Notes app. There was only one entry, titled “CRUSH LIST.” I laughed out loud. It was a password-protected note—a feature I’d forgotten existed. I tried every obvious password I could think of: his name, his birthday, our dog’s name. Nothing.
I was about to give up when I remembered the song he’d played on repeat for an entire summer. I typed in the title: `UMBRELLA`.
The note unlocked.
It wasn’t just a list of names. It was a raw, unedited diary entry. He wrote about the agony of not knowing if a girl in his biology class liked him back, his dreams of being a musician, his fear of failing his driving test. It was a voice I hadn’t heard in years—the voice of my brother before life made him serious and cautious.
But the real magic was in the messages. This iPod predated iMessage. It used the ancient art of SMS texting, saved directly onto the device. I scrolled through text chains with his friends, planning to meet at the mall, arguing about homework, using emoticons like :) and :P instead of emojis. It was a record of a time when connection was intentional, not constant. You went home, plugged your iPod into your computer, and your messages downloaded in a batch.
I spent the entire afternoon in 2008.
When Leo called that evening, I didn’t say hello. I just said, “So, Jessica Miller, huh?”
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. Then, a burst of laughter. “You did not find that iPod. Did you get into the note? How? What was the password?”
“ ‘Umbrella,’ by Rihanna,” I said.
He groaned. “Oh, man. I was so deep.” For the next hour, we talked. We talked about the friends in those texts, the songs he’d loved, the dreams he’d typed into that tiny screen. That dusty iPod Touch, a piece of obsolete Apple technology, did something our modern, always-connected phones never could: it gave us back a piece of our past, perfectly preserved.
It reminded us both who we were, and in doing so, reminded us of the bond we still share. The iPod is no longer in the junk drawer. It’s on my bookshelf, fully charged, a tiny, black mirror reflecting a moment in time, waiting for the next rainy day someone needs to visit the past.
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