Member-only story
Your Email Drafts Folder Is a Secret, Revealing Museum
It can shine a light on many different aspects of yourself.
I was looking for an email I’d started but hadn’t finished, when my eye caught on an array of compelling fragments along the various rows of unsent e-missives.
“I was hurled into the maw of hell at the age of 15.”
“I’m imagining you getting out your bow and arrow…”
“Since we came with our hay and our wine and our horse…”
I’d never spent much or any time, really, looking in my “drafts” folder so I was taken aback to notice it had a few hundred half-finished messages dating back seven years. Reading them felt like a kind of personal archeology. I thought about an article I’d read about mudlarkers looking through the Thames for little shards of London’s history. Except I was in Gmail.
That first line referencing the “maw of hell” happened to come from a story I’d been editing years ago about a teen being “shanghaied” and kidnapped on a ship, but some of the emails contained a personal element. There were notes to people I never quite worked up the nerve to send. Or after a little time passed, it seems like I might’ve thought better of it. There were pitches I didn’t pitch, cover letters I didn’t submit.
