Most kids didn’t have computers at home, let alone laptops. At some point we had a desktop computer with a huge CRT monitor which was a part of my mum’s work station and a Hewlett Packard laptop of my dad’s. Always at the forefront of new tech and a geek to his core, my dad loves interacting with any new gadget that will come across his perimeter and always manages to integrate it in his daily business.

Sometimes curious gadgets made their way to us through my dad’s cousin in the UK, our uncle — precursors to mobile phones, these things were fascinating in their form and utterly opaque in their function. Who uses those things and when? We imagined busy business people in skyscrapers or doctors on their way through ER, just like our uncle. What the reality of the users was never got clear to us, those devices didn’t make it to the Bulgarian market.

From time to time my brother and I would sneak and use dad’s laptop as well, so we quickly figured it out — the 30 minutes screen time were valid only for the “big” computer, on the laptop and the other funky devices time didn’t count, since they weren’t real computers. We were using this loophole for some time until our parents found out and extended the rule to the laptop as well. Then the 30 minutes grew into an hour, and we were taking shifts at the computer. At some point I received my first laptop and from then on sharing devices stopped being a thing.

So single-tasking was the way we did it back then, and keeping a window open meant the person using the device after you would see it — both of us always made sure to close everything before leaving the computer. Leaving any trace of our presence would have meant a great opportunity for our parents’ growing interest in our internet pastimes.

Fast forward some years, tabs became a thing to keep a memo for yourself, a kind of promise that you can pick things up where you left them. Those things are always interesting enough to get a space for themselves on your mental backlog but they never get the time to be consumed at the moment. There are various ways of dealing with this — a colleague of mine keeps a browser plugin called tabagotchi, which is happy only when a minimum of tabs are open. The more they get, the more your browser pet feels neglected. Another colleague treats tabs as a reading list to go through, bookmark services are an outdated concept to her. “That’s where articles go to die. You’re gonna save them and never look at them again.”

Meanwhile, I located a habit I didn’t know I have — if I managed to count properly, my iPhone currently has the mind-boggling 179 Safari tabs open. Scrolling through them makes me remember moments big and small in the last half a year, the oldest tabs date mid-September last year. I was able to recall this because around this time I visited Hamburg with a friend and was apparently fascinated with the local dialect, as an article on Plattdeutsch informs me. Further on different moments jump up from the showreel of my browser history and personal milestones — switching apartments, looking for new furniture, looking up spots to donate the old stuff, picking up drumming lessons, researching museums for a visit in London, buying hiking clothing for our roadtrip through the American national parks, various mildly interesting reads I never got to finish on my work trips on the train, booking a place to celebrate my birthday, searching for yet another piece of furniture for the still in-progress apartment; a timeline of half a year in the making.

When I found out I still have all those tabs open, I had the urge to simultaneously close all of them and start anew, what’s the chance of reading them anyway? But still, the fact that they have stacked silently all this time was curious — the portrait view we usually use our phones in when searching in the browser kept them out of sight. Seeing your digital traces can be an unnerving, yet beautiful thing, bits and bobs of your attention sprawling towards the horizon of time of your own browser history.

Couple of weeks later, new tabs keep on stacking on top of each other in my phone’s browser. I might get around cleaning them up at some point or I’ll just keep the portal to memory lane as long as it gets. Either that, or until one sunny day my phone finally gives up on loading all of them.