Attachments;
or, A Short Essay About Email That Turned into a Metaphor for Any Number of Things (see: Divorce, Family, Writing, Regret, (Fill in Your Own Blank))
by Aaron Burch
A warning banner along the top of my email tells me “you’re out of storage space and will soon be unable to send or receive emails until you free up space or purchase additional storage,” and although I like the idea of not being able to receive any more emails, the freedom of it, the actual idea of not being able to send or receive any more emails is… I wouldn’t say it terrifies me, but I wouldn’t not say it, and so I start scrolling through emails and folders, I do an advanced search to find all emails with attachments over 20mb, and writing this later, i.e., now, I think about that word, attachments, the weight of it, but in the now of the actual present tense of this happening I don’t, not yet, instead I just see an inbox search full of emails with large pictures or PDFs or other large files and deleting all, or even some, of these would of course be the quickest, easiest way to make space, they are the very emails, the pictures and PDFs and other large files, the attachments I don’t want to part with, not yet, and so, returning to looking for alternate ideas, I click on my Drafts folder and there’s more emails than I ever would have guessed, or, not emails, not yet, email drafts, and first I imagine myself as a kind of person with nothing at all in this folder, clean and organized and spare and minimal, and then I imagine myself as a kind of person whose email drafts are all emails I wanted to send but didn’t, a folder of things that at some point I felt needed to be sent but then knew to also be better left unsaid, or at least unsent, all rather than the kind of person I actually am and the Drafts folder that this actually is, a collection of emails started just to find someone’s email address to then cut and paste into a different, actual email; or emails started, forgotten about, and then started again later after forgetting the first attempt; or emails started as a placeholder for comments for student papers to then cut and paste onto actual student papers; or any number of other disorganized, temporary, forgotten chunks of text, and I don’t need any of them, that’s the very reason they’re here, but I like them, this graveyard of unimportant ephemera, and so I go looking through my email again, and I find a folder titled “’12 Travel” and I know that if I click on it, even just to verify the emails inside being too old for me to ever have a need for again, that I will find something my brain will want to classify as necessary or interesting or some other excuse for holding onto, and so instead I drag the whole folder to the garbage without looking, which opens up enough space to nullify the almost full warning, I am no longer in danger of not receiving any new emails, although, even now, I know I have only deleted enough storage that this is all going to happen again in a week or two or three, but I can deal with that then, I don’t need to right now. Has that ever happened to you?
Aaron Burch is the author of the memoir/literary analysis Stephen King’s The Body; the short story collection, Backswing; and the novella, How to Predict the Weather. He is the Founding Editor of Hobart and HAD.
