An Email Love Story
Generated with Midjourney
Being 21 and moving to a strange country is scary enough. Doing so before ubiquitous mobile connection was a thing, in 2002, was something entirely different than it is now.
I had picked up and moved out of Ontario — quite suddenly — and sojourned to a remote sea-side Scottish town with my new partner and a backpack full of books for what I planned to be a two-year long adventure.
Having just graduated college, I was full of dreams and expectations ready to be broken. While my partner spent her days escaping submerged helicopters (she was training to work on an oil rig in the North Sea), I spent my days idly manning a video store counter, consuming every season of Friends. This wasn’t the wild ride I had expected my overseas adventure to be.
It wasn’t long before I became homesick. I didn’t have enough money for a computer (although I bought a pretty hot word processor from a pawn shop that subsequently ran out of ink and sat unused) and writing letters felt unnecessarily laborious.
So every day, after dropping my partner off at work, I’d hike to the central library to plop myself at one of those CRT monitors with a dodgy internet connection and pump out epic emails to my family and friends. These emails were extravagantly confessional, with musings about my choices in life, a desire for meaning and direction, and a plea for maintaining a connection with a life I felt was fading away.
In response my mom would write long, winding emails that absorbed all of my concerns into the comforting and thoughtful embrace only a mother could provide. My friends would share, in fine details, the mundanity of their Ontario lives (“we drove two hours to the beach, ordered fries, went home”) and I would read rapturously, strategizing my triumphant return home.
The loneliness got the best of me, and I returned home four months later, 20 months shy of my original plan. My partner — although initially surprised — had somehow managed to build herself a quiet life in that small Scottish town and was content to stay behind. When I boarded the plane I was overcome with a great sense of loss, a feeling that I had failed her, as well as myself.
The beautiful thing about email is that, if you’re smart, it’s as easy to recover as a box of old photographs. Last year I popped into my stagnant hotmail account and, out of curiosity, dug out the messages I sent to my family and friends that year. What I found was a boy who was grappling with a world bigger, and more complex, than he had ever imagined; someone who naively assumed that there are such things as two year plans; someone who mistakened a change of location as a change of identity.
These days, my messages with family and friends are five words or less. I fear that many years in the future, when I want to look back and reconfigure the person I used to be, I’ll find only an assortment of cryptic fragments, contextless and indifferent. And at that point I’ll remember why email was special, and how its purpose was not to reveal “50% Discounts for 10 days only!” but to archive our very selves.
When new technologies emerge, they often take the shape of their predecessors before turning into something uniquely their own. TV shows that read like radio plays; websites that read like pamphlets; and communication that read like letters, as thoughtful, winding and revealing as ever.
It may well be time to look back and wonder if we’re missing something very central to the human experience by leaving emails in favour of snippets and non-sequiturs. My hope is that Hey could maybe point to a future where email is once again meaningful and emotional, once more a way that we can capture ourselves in time, waiting to be rediscovered.