if you find this email
subject line: thank you for understanding
Dear N,
I think you’d really love this book I just read. It’s called Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney and I’m regretful to say I put off reading her books for the longest time - funny how some mainstream bestsellers I’ll avoid exactly because of that and some I’ll jump to read if I catch the hype wave at the right angle. Maybe it’s because I had read Anxious People already (by Fredrik Backman and I think you’d really love this one too) and thought it was a better fit for me than Normal People haha. But at some point good books become unavoidable no matter where you try to hide and being endlessly sent to Rooney I finally downloaded one of her books and cried while reading it on the train. It’s nothing special, just about two friends and their lives as they write emails (which are whole chapters in the book) to each other and figure out how to be adults in this contemporary world. Every bit of this novel is painfully true, and I can imagine us ending up in situations similar to this pair of friends so maybe we should read up, if not only to prepare for the hypothetical future. I loved the emails most of all: raw and rambly and a refreshingly honest dip into the mind of a lost twenty-something. I’m sure that if she had chosen any other segment of their lives it would have been just as good, because the emails were just thoughts and questions put into words and those will always remain, and remain interesting, or so I hope. They made me want to write my own emails and not feel silly when sounding philosophical and feel a little less constrained to 280 character beliefs.
And when I imagined who I’d be sending these to, I couldn’t. My fantasy ended with the writing, but I thought of you because you’re my best friend and because you first introduced me to the wonder of unsent emails. I went to check the site that you showed me back in high school, the one that I’ve been checking regularly since, not expecting much. It hasn’t been updated in months, even after we both independently offered to the owners to take it over.
ifyoufindthisemail.com. Even the name feels poetically familiar. I’ve spent countless hours reading through every single unsent email submitted by heartbroken, joyful, lost and confused souls from all over the world. Did I tell you that I have a file with links to my favorites — the ones that made me chuckle for someone else’s fortune, cry over their (or was it my?) heartaches, the one about the girl who finally learned how to boil eggs and then broke down in her kitchen because she had no one to share them with. I laughed, then cried, because at the moment I was reading, I wasn’t sure either who would be willing to eat my boiled eggs. Before I learned to write for myself, I wrote to them and submitted the emails I could never send to their intended recipients. It was disheartening to witness the slowing roll of updates and heartbreaking to accept the eventual stagnation, but what I never imagined possible would be that the site could just disappear. Every unsent email now will never have the one in billions chance of being read by the person they were meant for, or the much more likely probability of being read by someone who needed them. There was a point where I needed them.
The ghosts of the pages I met still linger in my browser history. The links I carefully curated and saved are now all dead. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the next day when you called, you noted sadly that the site was no longer there.
Some time ago I stumbled upon a manifesto to simplify the internet, to focus on maintainability of sites over shiny animations and complicated frameworks. Longevity of web pages. They called for simple html/css files, the ones that would last, wouldn’t break over the years. And I wondered naively how long I could get by holding onto this as an interesting idea, a fun ideal to come back to later. I could accept that these were fleeting, that the existence of a site one day did not guarantee the next, but N, it never hit me that I could truly be affected by the disappearance of some internet corner. Forums and images and digital spaces have slipped away from me in the past, carried by the constant river of time away to some land of spirits where internet content goes to die. There’s no landfill or graveyard. The words simply disappear. I had loved them once. But then, it always felt like the natural progression of things, the same as a lost memory or thought. Every friend that has slipped from my life I have also loved. Quora answers and childhood games and favorite bloggers. Your blog. But those all floated away while I was already upstream, only one day looking back to find a scene slightly different with nothing to compare to. We watched our beloved emails wither before disappearing. I wonder how many others watched their loved spaces deteriorate, forgotten. Even Club Penguin had a monumental sendoff.
Ironically, I couldn’t find the post on the impermanence of the web nor the person who made it. I’m sure it still exists, but that is only a statement of faith in their adherence to their values, but to me it’s almost as if it’s no longer there. I thought for sure I had saved it, but in which of my dozens of digital pockets? In the process, I found this little gem: The Unbearable Lightness of Web Pages.
Web pages are ghosts: they’re like images projected onto a wall. They aren’t durable. If you turn off the projector (i.e. web server), the picture disappears. If you know how to run a projector, and you can keep it running all the time, you can have a web site.
But as soon as there’s no one to babysit the projector, it eventually gets turned off, and everything you made with it goes away. If the outage is permanent, the disappearance is too.
I always took the company of the web for granted, making excuses for the ghosts. But what can we do? Internet Archive is but another site on the web, though it brings me joy to see that the site was loved enough to have some emails be saved multiple times over the years. We could save everything in physical paper or locally on our computers, but maybe we can also learn to let go, the same way we let go of sunsets and passing conversations. How will we come back to these fragments? I don’t know.
An unexpected thought I had during all of this was that it’s easier to find a moment, a picture on my phone than a passing voice on the internet. It comes from me taking more pictures in my daily life. I used to hate pausing life to snap my camera but I’ve stopped journaling in the sense of logging the happenings of each day, so the images are really all I have. And I think I understand now why you take so many pictures. Words are subject to moods but images will only grow over time with each glance. Some of my pictures are so enormous that I can spend countless minutes reminiscing on the memories and the memories of each time I’ve reminisced. It’s funny how we always said we were best friends because we understood each other, not in the way of having the same feelings but intimately knowing the workings of another’s mind, how they would react, why they did — but now I share this feeling about photographs. I understand in new ways, and for some reason I found that so surprising.
It’s 4am and I wonder why I felt compelled to write this email that I won’t send, that took me days to draft. I like the idea of unserious ramblings being given space. It feels like there’s so little space these days to express an idea — texts push us to fragment our thoughts into textable chunks. Maybe that’s part of why I find it hard to respond, I have to collect and compress my mental chatter into snippets that will fit reasonably within a 3 inch screen, when it’s expected that most communication is instantaneous. Have a thought. Send it. Where does a sentence get room to sit and grow? There’s something so appealing about using a platform associated with work for silly messages. The seriousness allows for more lightness when transgressed. I miss the days where we’d all send emails in elementary school before we had phones. I miss those emails and I miss ifyoufindthisemail.
If you find this email, thanks for understanding. You told me you’d eat my hard boiled eggs and I love you for that. I’d eat your hard boiled eggs too.
- A
“So of course in the midst of everything, the state of the world being what it is, humanity on the cusp of extinction, here I am writing another email about sex and friendship. What else is there to live for?” ― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You
I really think you’d enjoy this book.
Let me know if you’d like to be email buddies! I have no promises, except to allow you space for your thoughts.
Lovely post! It warms the heart to know that the website will always live in the Wayback Machine, somehow.