I Still Keep My Glitchy Gmail of Many Years for Sentimental Reasons

Sometimes it is so hard to let go of things you have created memories with

Email service arrived in the boondocks much later than it did in the nearest city 200 miles away.

Quite understandable considering we lived in a tiny town by the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains. Moreover, those boxy machines from which emails could be accessed were still a luxury not many could afford.

My cousin who helped me set up my first email account on his computer had a username I thought was pretty cool back then — Georgiesoft. In hindsight, it sounds cringy but it made perfect sense since Microsoft is not only synonymous with computers but also represented a country we had hitherto heard about only in books and movies.

And that’s how my email id— [email protected], was born.

This email remains my primary account despite the fact that it simultaneously feels like a sepia-toned album of memories and a graveyard of dreams.

An album because it has hundreds of photographs dating back from a time when you had to manually upload pictures from your camera and hit send to the recipient.

Strewn amongst them are the bittersweet ones of those of a smiling, bright-eyed new bride. If you flipped that album fast enough, you’re likely to miss how the glimmer in those eyes progressively dims to bleakness and finally, resignation.

There are also token snapshots from vacations in exotic destinations which at one time made for the perfect social media posts if nothing else. Maybe the idea behind them was if you pretended hard enough to the outside world, you could ignore the plaster crumbling from within the walls of your home.

I resent turning the pages of that particular album.

And yet I refuse to let go of these photographs of a woman I feel overly protective of, not in a pitying sort of way, mind you, but because I feel the depth of her pain, unhappiness, and helplessness.

It is not that I haven’t seriously thought of giving up on my Gmail altogether. Leave it to gather dust in some forgotten corner of the internet while the world moves on uninterrupted. But not entirely because it is a receptacle of painful memories but on account of the pesky technical issues that seemed to plague the email service from time to time.

Like the important emails that were never delivered for whatever glitchy reason or wound up in spam where you never thought to look. Not to mention the emails from unsolicited senders asking for money in the name of one scam or another that pops up in the inbox from time to time. Add in the horror stories that abound of people whose emails have been hacked and I can’t help but wonder what I am still doing with it.

And yet, I can’t seem to completely let go even though I find myself using it less and less. Probably because it has something I actually treasure. Something I still go to on rainy days when I need a little pick me upper.

From a trove of a thousand emails that is the only reminder of a sweet albeit fleeting romance that existed before instant messaging became all the rage, I can select an email and be swept back to a time when people actually poured their hearts out into the long, winding, typewritten letters to each other.

Alas, it is a sad state of affairs when I say that I have never since then received love letters so beautifully written, so rich in emotion, and so romantic that it still has the power to make my heart beat faster.

The reason for that can be blamed on the current trend where feelings of love are demonstrated more and more through digital emotions of the instant kind.

It’s not just the emoticons, stickers, or bewildering number of acronyms or abbreviations that are replacing good old-fashioned expression through words but the fact that the latter seems to have become a dying art as online communication becomes shorter and shorter due to the former.

When studies show that over 6 billion emoticons are sent in a day across the world and a staggering 74% of Americans use them to communicate on a regular basis, one cannot simply ignore the writing on the wall.

However, as a writer and hopeless romantic, I have to say I miss those heartfelt letters, the desire they sparked, and the longing they invoked. Thanks to them, I still have a piece of his heart with me even though he has been long gone from my life.

And through the hundreds of thousands of words, we exchanged over the course of a few months, love took an almost tangible, timeless form, totally unlike its replacement, the vaporous emojis.