Note to self
“I have this odd thing,” he says, “where I feel like the contents of unopened emails in my inbox might be in a constant state of flux.”
“Interesting. You mean like, a Schrodinger’s email?”
“I guess? It’s like, maybe karma changes the contents depending on when I look at them, or it’s a pendulum swinging back and forth between varying degrees of good or bad news.”
“Something recent?”
“Job interview. I was waiting for the results.”
“And?”
“The title of the email and the first line were there in my inbox: Application for position (cafe manager) — Dear Steven, and then the dreaded dot-dot-dot.”
“How long did you wait?”
“A couple of days, I think.”
“What did it end up saying?”
He shakes his head. “No luck, unfortunately. Lack of experience, no background in the field, not what they’re looking for, do keep in touch. You know the drill.”
“I do. But uh… cafe manager?”
“You never know, right?” He shrugs. “In any case, it’s back to the drawing board, I guess.”
“I had a similar thing with an ex-girlfriend a while back,” I say. “We broke up, and–”
“You broke up?”
“…She dumped me.”
“That’s better. Honesty, best policy, etcetera.”
“Whatever. Anyway, a week later she sent me a letter. I didn’t open it for a couple of days.”
“Oh?”
“I didn’t know what she had to say that could matter by that point.”
“You wondered if she wanted to come back?”
I shake my head. “I wondered if she needed that sense of closure. This letter is an end. Let it be officially known. It has been written, and so it was once a thing. The end. And then she closes the book, and puts it on the shelf.”
“It’s like without that clear ending, things just vaguely continue for eternity, huh?”
“Yep.”
“So, what did it say? In the end?”
“‘Thanks for our time together, and all the fun we had. I’ll never forget it.’ Lies written so beautifully I almost didn’t want to throw the letter away.”
“You think the contents could have changed over the days you left that letter?”
I laugh. Shake my head. “Only if I’d been a different person.”
(A better one.)
“I just can’t do it sometimes,” he says. “Open letters immediately. Not if I feel like there’s weight to them.”
It’s odd to think – that everything we write might hang somewhere in the ether, ever warping and changing depending on our karma scores. More likely though, the content remains constant – our perception simply warping around it.
“Perhaps you should write yourself a letter,” I say, “fill it with some thoughts. Perhaps something important. Weighty. Leave it in your inbox for a while. See if it feels any different when you finally get around to reading it.”
“Hm.”
He looks down at his hands. Seems to think it over some.
“Yeah, no. I don’t think I’ll do that,” he says finally.
I shrug. “Fair enough.”
Because coming in touch with the mirror between what we want of ourselves and what we really are?
Well, perhaps sometimes that’s a little too frightening a truth to want to see up close.
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