Unsend

One thing I miss about snail mail - it could legitimately 'get lost'.

I am never excited about getting mail anymore. It’s not just because I’m never going to pay off my VISA bill unless reincarnation is real, but I never receive personal mail anymore. No one sends me letters. Sadly, I don’t really send letters to anyone either. I do spend all day sending and receiving emails however. I am addicted to email. I wouldn’t say I was ever addicted to writing letters – I had a much healthier relationship with that medium. It was before subject lines haunted my waking hours and I found myself clicking “check mail” in my sleep.

I miss having that shoebox of the letters I’d gathered over the years that moved with me from apartment to apartment to apartment. Every time I move/run away, I decide for a brief pragmatic moment that I should just throw them out - it’s enough already saving old paper. But as soon as I take off that lid, and smell that scent of sentimentality wafting up, I stop dead in my tossing tracks. It just seems insensitive to throw out all that hard work.

I do save emails, but it’s different. It’s not like having something physically in your hands. A print-out of an email is so generic – uniform black type on white 8 1/2 x 11 paper. It’s just not the same as scribbles on full-scap. Listen, don’t get me wrong, email has changed my life, but I can’t help feeling like my world of correspondence is missing a little something now that no one I know has the time or patience for letters.

One thing both snail-mail and email have in common is they both don’t have the option to “unsend”. Once the mail chute bangs shut or the send buttons clicks – it’s over. You’re message is on its way, so you better start dealing with the consequences immediately. Good luck.

After I finished university, I wasn’t sure what to do with my life and my cultural anthropology degree (with a minor in critical theory), so I dropped everything and moved to from Montreal to Vancouver to live with my sister. After a few months, it was clear that I had outstayed my welcome at her house, so I went on to house sit for 6 months. I got a job as a receptionist for a sewage pump manufacturer. Things were looking down.

I hated my life. Everything was so temporary and I saw no end in sight. Staying alone in a strange house and surrounded by someone else’s stuff, art, music, life, and working a low-level, unimportant job made me feel invisible and worthless. I became increasingly depressed and began to long for my old life in Montreal, romanticizing my college years as if they were a golden era, and I had some pretty compelling arguments to support that theory.

I also romanticized my old Montreal boyfriend Dave - whom I hadn’t spoken to since our messy break-up a year ago. Forgetting all about our endless fighting, his inability to emotionally connect and mild drinking problem, I longed for that wonderful relationship. And then I did the thing you are never ever ever supposed to do in that situation…I called him. And we talked. And then I called him the next night. Our conversations were not romantic – they were more like good friends entertaining each other with witty observations and anecdotes about our day. Our dialog was frenetic and funny with no pauses, fearing that if there was a second of dead air, the question of whether either of us was seeing someone new would come up. I was tormented by the warm feelings I was having for him all over again, and I couldn’t remember why we had broken up. I was also tormented by the idea of admitting these feelings to him. What if he rejected me all over again? But what if he felt the same way? What if we had another chance in our destiny? I should at least let him know about how bad I felt about the way things went down when we were together. Right?

Finally, one night I came home frustrated and depressed and decided I would write to Dave and tell him how I really felt, how much I think we’ve both changed, and how I think we should give “us” another chance. I wrote quickly and by the end it was pages of lovey dovey apologetic please-take-me-back drivel. I searched for an envelope like I was running a race. I knew I only had a small window to get this letter off before I talked myself out of the whole thing. I didn’t have one, so in haste I made one out of a piece of 8 ½” X 11” paper and some tape. I stole a stamp from the desk drawer, the price of a house sitter, and ran out to the mailbox in the middle of the night. The second I put the letter in the box and closed the chute, instead of relief I felt a rush of pure unprocessed dread. I knew I had made a big mistake.

I let the moment get the better of me. I didn’t want to get back together with Dave – we weren’t right for each other and deep down I knew that – I needed to move on. It was time to set my feet down in Vancouver and start a real life with a job I could stand, a place I could call my own and maybe even make some friends.

A week passed. Dave called. He called to tell me two things. One was he was engaged to get married. The second was that he had received my letter – sort of…. He had received an envelope, but that was it. He claimed that my makeshift envelope must have come “untaped” in its journey, and all he was left with was an empty envelope, no letter. I took a deep breath, thanked god, and wished him congratulations. We said our good-byes. This time we meant it.

I feel asleep that night thinking about Jim, this guy who was a project manager at the sewage pump company. We had joked around a bit at the photocopier the other day. Maybe he’d like to go for a drink.