A stroll through an empty home.

I logged into my ye olde Hotmail account today. It was a bit like walking through an old house. The unread inbox had the odd junk mail like weeds popping up through random floorboards. There were odd cobwebs in the form of old newsletters I forgot I'd signed up for. The obligatory rodents peeking out from around a corner were the "THANK YOU FOR REGISTERING" emails from all those accounts I'd signed up for once but never used twice. But the depressing part was that all the furniture was stolen.

I'm a bit of a pack-rat, and I like to hold onto anything that ever held a shred of significance or could possibly become significant in the future. In reality most of it was a bunch of junk. Surveys, forwards, chain letters, etc. But what I really treasured was the plethora of email correspondence between old friends.

The first email I got from that chick I met at the crappy summer job. She'd turn out to be one of the best friends I'd ever have. There were nifty old and forgotten projects I'd worked on with buddies - animated gifs, the website we'd toiled over for an entire term, our first Photoshop experiments. The acceptance letter that got into a gaming clan, one that I'm still a member of today (even though almost everyone else has moved on).

There was an email where someone at school spilled the beans that I liked a certain girl. Another one or two from mutual friends who said she liked me too. One about how I needed to try to get out of my shell and make an effort for her. How I'd make her day just by asking her out. A dozen or so flirtatious messages between me and said girl. Some were long and detailed, others were short and to the point. There was the email where I pleaded with the best friend to drive 40mins just to come and sit with me; the girl I liked had split my heart clean in two.

There were funny jokes, school rumors, bits and pieces of assignments, both long and short term plans, some "where are you know" messages, and tons more "Thank you for registering" confirmations for sites that I've oh-so-long ago forgotten.

I guess I lost all of this because it had been so long since I last logged in. After things fell apart with the aforementioned girl I liked, I kind of lost reason to keep in contact with most of those people.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about all this. It's nice to have that history and dialogue there to fall back to. Read through the better memories and take note about what I could've done different to avoid the bad ones. On the other hand, it was chock-full of shards that resembled one of the less-enjoyable years of my life. Some things are better to forget and move on from.

I never really think of that girl anymore. I can't even remember the last time I talked to most of those 'mutual friends'. That best friend I met at the summer job and I have since drifted too far apart. I kept every piece of email correspondence I ever had with her.

So in some ways I guess it was all a changelog and narration of various relationships that have since dissipated into the wind. Part of me knows that there used to be so much more there. Part of me knows that I've long since walked away from it all, and lost conversations have no bearing on how I go about my day-to-day life.

And so I stand in this empty house. You can almost see the crop-cirles in the carpet where the old chair was and the faded sections of the wall that surround where the book case used to be. And all of it is actually nothing but a long lost series of 1's and 0's. Purged from a countless amount of other 1's and 0's swirling around a digital world to make room for more houses and homes.

Funny how that works.
-Cril

When I walk beside her
I am the better man
When I look to leave her
I always stagger back again

Once I built an ivory tower
So I could worship from above
When I climb down to be set free
She took me in again

There’s a big
A big hard sun
Beating on the big people
In the big hard world

Eddie Vedder - Hard Sun