Ghosts of Inboxes Past

Treasures and terrors manifold await!

Photo Credit: Unseen Histories

As a getting-to-know-you question, I sometimes ask people if they remember their first-ever email addresses. I came of age in the early aughts, when you connected to the world wide web via ethernet, when chatrooms loomed large and teens posted cryptic song lyrics as AIM away messages. My first email address was RAINS12343948@aol.com (not the real one; I can’t possibly remember that sequence of nonsense numbers now!). Under duress, I chose that address because, well, I really liked rain? I’ve done more for less, I guess.

And since that original email address, I’ve made half a dozen more accounts, transitioning with jobs and pen names; designating certain accounts for niche purposes, like school newsletters or test emails for my stints in e-commerce. Over the years, I’ve let go of the goofy email addresses in favor of more professional ones. Within that heap of discarded email addresses are identities I’ve shed: the student, the intern, the baby writer who blithely sent her first essay to the New Yorker.

Recently, in order to find a lost password, I had to log into an account that I hadn’t checked in almost a decade. Once I opened it, I was flooded with unread messages that I forgot to forward to myself. Ads from stores where I used to shop, ones I couldn’t picture patronizing anymore, so divorced is my current lifestyle from that glorious miniskirts-and-statement-necklace epoch. There were countless surveys from a film festival I attended in downtown Austin. A sweet note from a friend I’d lost touch with. An odd ask from an ex who I hadn’t heard from in years. As I deleted most of these emails, I couldn’t resist taking a peek at my Sent folder, that graveyard of silly jokes and self-righteous forwards and earnest job applications. 

In the midst of all those dusty communications, there were also pages upon pages of emails that I’d exchanged with my husband, back in the early days of our courtship. At the time, we both worked office jobs that compounded periods of frantic activity with ones of mind-numbing boredom. During those downtimes, we’d often shoot one another quick messages: complaints of our coworkers, suggestions of places to go for dinner, random trivia we’d picked up in the course of the day. I found the first time we wrote “I love you” and the first time he invited me to meet his extended family in Ohio. I remember workshopping my initial email to him with a friend, wondering if the “xo” in the signature was too forward, if I was being too verbose (yes, the answer was/is always yes). Those messages were our version of an epistolary romance. Without them, I wonder if we’d fallen in love so quickly.

In rereading all those old messages, I caught a glimpse of the person I was. Struggling to find my purpose at a job I didn’t altogether like; living in a city I couldn’t afford; experimenting with all the myriad forms of expression that come with being young and hopeful and unwritten. As much as the evidence delivers some pretty potent cringing, I also melt when I encounter the version of me who wasn’t afraid of risks, both emotional and practical. Former Me was sometimes over-confident, often cripplingly sensitive, but always vulnerable. Almost always brave. I like to think that I can find my way back there, to that place where leaps of the heart were the default, not the exception. Maybe in the process, I’ll recover my belief that the future is not, in fact, written in stone.

Halloween has descended on my fall-flecked reach of suburbia, which means that the veil between our world and the spirit world is thin. Perhaps, on this day of possibility, we’ll discover that the veil between our current selves and our past selves isn’t quite so opaque either. What a gift it is to revisit our pasts again, to encounter the ghosts that populate our memories, and to embrace them for what they are: essential markers in an existence that always manages to surprise us.