Evacuating 15 gigabytes of tears.

Today, January 21st, I decided to delete a large quantity of correspondences with an ex-partner – a very important one – that I had been saving in my email inbox for about four years, despite the sense that I would probably never talk to or see that ex again. I hadn’t wanted to delete the emails, but I also didn’t want to look at them, and there they were, accumulating space that was turning out to be badly needed for current communiqués.

I tend to run a somewhat tight and unsentimental email ship – except for my occasional sloppiness in getting rid of jokey and interesting correspondence that may or may not be of utilitarian value to me. I delete mass emails, things that are too abstract or belong to alternative trajectories that, I’ve decided, don’t belong to me anymore. Dry-eyed, I delete petitions on behalf of starving kids in Africa, raped and mutilated women in the Congo, pleas to sign a protest against the corruption in Chicago, newsletters for upcoming events of social and cultural import – these days, there’s very little that I don’t delete. For that which I truly need to save, I archive and file emails under labels – my favorite and most useful one being the long-winded “deserving of a response soon” – and then click the label and pull up those red-alert emails, those that need my direct attention. All others may get a star, which signals importance but is lower on the hierarchy than the aforementioned “deserving of…” and finally, for arcana that may be important somewhere down the road, I apply a more categorical label (“dissertation,” “theatre 369,” “Central America,” and the slightly chilling “JOB MARKET”).

And yet I awoke a few weeks ago to the notice that I was nearing the end of my Google cache. Even with my organizational systems in place, I was accruing emails at a rate and volume that were surpassing the capacity of the system. Google asked me to buy additional storage space. I gnashed my teeth and started deleting, going back in time to almost 2005.

We all knew that this would eventually be an issue, right? A person can’t forever gain information and yet stay within a limit. Isn’t there a mathematical theorem that might tell us something about our use of this space? And what of the coming demise of net neutrality?

Anyhow, as the warning repeatedly cropped up, I started trying to delete everything in sight, and today had me doing the same. I thought about that large stash of old, musty (or the virtual equivalent of) emails between myself and L., at first flowery, playful, and exciting, as we strutted our words and knowledge to impress each other – as we showed off, knowing that we were both incredibly smart and interesting, winning, sexy, lovely, humane individuals with synthetic abilities to integrate and share vast amounts of data. Then, a bit later, melodramatic, wistful, affectionate, ironical, jokey, masked, accusatory, bitter, frank, pointed, cutting, and sometimes abrasive…finally, utilitarian or occasional, and often indirect, as in “I think that your mother might like this link.” Those types of emails, as many of us might agree, mark the moribund end of the email chain, when the patient has all but flatlined.

Anyhow, today I decided, what the hell, might as well delete them. I knew what most of them said, and I didn’t take pleasure in retracing their dialogic lines and reacknowledging their cutesy bursts of cleverness, signs of a more naïve attempt at love and relationship-building. My own forays into that sort of sentimentality, especially with people who I might hope to date, have since been few and far between. I know how taxing it can be to shape and structure one’s words so lovingly, in a show of epistolary extravagance, and then later to note the diminishment of pleasure in that activity, as the vocabulary is shaved to the minimum, the written/verbal equivalent of throwing on an old sweatshirt and spending the night sedentary. I also wonder about the value of words – as words, especially the exchange of them, in media like email and physical letters, or phrases and references scribbled on the backs of old photographs and mementos lovingly dug up from strange archives to present as individualized gifts, were such an important part of our connection on many levels. I remember my extreme delight upon receipt of a letter from L., when we had just met, and I wasn’t sure about my level of interest in being with him. My occasional, sneaking feelings of tepid trepidation turned into certitude and joy as I followed the letter’s scrawl – his handwriting endeared itself to me, and I always recognized and recognize its inimitable structure and distribution. I remember feeling extremely fortunate and experiencing euphoria. Real euphoria, like I’d never had it.
Is it necessary for me to have that kind of wordy, emotive intimacy with a lover now? Even if I felt that our verbal exchanges were pitch-perfect, what about the other factors in the relationship that were off-kilter? Time and space were working against us, and those seemed to really overtake and embitter anything that words could sweeten. Either way, I know two things about the relationship, which I’ve established conclusively: 1) it was real; and 2) it ended because it needed to. So that’s my closure there. And I remember that even when we broke up for real, and I stared down into the Greek salad that I had ordered, suddenly unable to eat even a piece of lettuce, he laughed at a joke that I had just made and complimented me on my capacity for wordplay and verbal comedy.

In retrospect, ‘après le delete,’ I feel that maybe I should have saved all of the emails into a text file – but that thought did not occur to me, and I don’t even know if exportation of that magnitude is possible. When I hastily went back and ‘checked all that [applied],’ I found that there were almost two thousand emails between me and this person – a formidable volume, and something that suggests that we were very important parts of each other’s lives, and still should be, to some extent. Well, I already knew the former, but perhaps the latter isn’t possible…? I would hope that it is, but at the end we’d really run out of things to say, in the truest sense. A casual look at the emails’ volume and heft charts that precipitous decline, an almost embarrassing fall that parallels the protagonist’s arc from genius to mentally disabled subject in that book, Flowers for Algernon, that we all had to read in high school. (At least I think that that’s what happened. I may have skipped it.)

So I erased all 1938 emails – many more, really, if you consider that many of these were email chains with over 100 threads – and I guess that I want to monumentalize or commemorate this in some way. I can no longer access the information, and something about the action feels cold or even foolish, although part of me also knows that I’ll likely never read them again, and pragmatically speaking, I needed the space. Another part of me feels that the other person has likely done the same thing, and maybe years ago. I also feel that maybe it’s not a big deal to flush out these old things. Hoarding is unhealthy, or so the saying goes. In the past, I’d felt reluctant to delete so voluminously, so voluptuously, but now I felt okay about it, granted myself the permission, and there it went, and I don’t feel so bad. More like I’m watching a ship slowly pass through the Panama Canal. A kind of elbows-on-the-railing type feeling.

So consider this a verbal marker, paltry monument that it is, to what was an extremely rich conversation in my life. Hopefully I can find one as wonderful as that one was, or maybe I no longer need something of that exact nature to be satisfied. Maybe I’m romanticizing fruitlessly, for the sake of feeling worthy of being in love (especially because I haven’t really loved someone naively and fully like that since the relationship ended about 3-4 years ago). Maybe I’ve moved on and matured in my conception of what love or a relationship needs to function. Either way, I now have 17% empty space in my inbox, which I will doubtlessly fill in a year, at most.