something to say: modern archaeology

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In my wardrobe there’s a cigar box that I’ve carried from house to house since I was 18. Inside are love letters, photos, trinkets and drawings from the last 20 years of my life. I always thought I controlled the box, and with it the memories. If I burnt the box or threw it in a creek, it would all be gone. That was until I decided to go through my 20-plus-year-old email account. Turns out I’ve been carrying a digital cigar box around in my pocket all this time.

Like so many other paranoid and big-tech-exhausted citizens, I wanted to move away from my email provider, known for prying and dominating the world. As far as I could tell, I started the account around the time my uni email was due to end and Hotmail was becoming a penis-enlargement spam factory. That’s over two decades of unsorted emails languishing in the swamp of my inbox. Deleting emails is not something I do. I let them pile up like the digital laundry they are – some good, some bad, some filthy. The plan was to cull brutally, keeping only those needed for legal, tax or nostalgic reasons. I had no idea what I was walking into. It was a hall of mirrors – my memories of the past revealed themselves to be so distorted that I had to question who I actually am.

I have a new mantra: I can maintain loving friendships with exes. That’s big.

Turns out that I am the kind of person who stays friends with exes. I didn’t realise we’d all made peace so many years ago. We – all these people I had loved (or liked enough) and I – kept that love after the anger had subsided. Sure, we drifted apart over the years, but there was genuine affection in the long missives exchanged post-break-up. As a prolific relationship leaver due to my own flaws, I assumed there had only been resentment. But after the break-up emails and some time, civility returned and then the parts of each other we had loved had room to return too. There were emails detailing long-forgotten nights out as friends, advice on new relationships, and life updates. I have a new mantra: I can maintain loving friendships with exes. That’s big.

You know what else was big? Every email among my friends. We wrote a lot. Long, wonderful, winding emails sent from internet cafés where we were short on money and time. Emails tapped out in my rusty Mitsubishi Lancer as I drove through streets looking for unlocked WiFi connections. I miss these long spiels. Now it’s abrupt texts and emojis. Where’s the inner monologue spewed forth on the page (I mean, mine is here, but my friends’)? I knew everything about their lives, thoughts and bowel movements. No detail was spared.

I rediscovered a period when I reverted to my full name and hyphenated it with my middle name. I found emails from my long-dead dad who would forward dumb jokes and sign them off with “LOVE DAD”, shouting it from his computer to wherever I was in the world. There were job offers accidentally ignored and many job applications sent out into the ether, floating on unacknowledged into eternity. Then there was evidence of the time I let a journalist take my photo in a bar, only to find myself on the front page of the Herald Sun in an article about binge drinking the very next day. And so many emails sent in the middle of the night and early morning. I had no idea I’d ever made it past midnight.

I don’t know whether to be more shocked at the abundance of friends or my horrific memory.

There were friends I’d forgotten ever having. I found emails exchanges with people I thought were only ever loose acquaintances – friends in the same group but not ones I would hang with solo. We bantered back and forth, made plans, talked of dancing together. I don’t know whether to be more shocked at the abundance of friends or my horrific memory.

There was the time my account was hacked and started sending emails to a group of five old friends sporadically over a series of months. There would be silence for weeks then another would surface. The emails had nothing but a link and a weird subject line – my favourite being “drift all you fuckin comets runnin from the front line”. There was nothing I could do to make the spam stop, but it kept the six of us connected across the globe. My spammers would force us all back into another thread. We were in it together.

Like all archaeological digs, there was a lot of useless junk among the treasures. Supposedly life-altering dramas that I don’t recall, work emails, housemate logistics and financial stresses. I deleted it all.

The process was both enlightening and tiresome, but the treasures I found reinforced my decision to change email providers. It was unsettling to know that this whole time the email mega-corporation had a more complete picture of me than I have ever had.

This rad story is from issue 132, which you can nab from the frankie shop or visit one of our lovely stockists. For future issues, subscribe here. 

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