You could tell the story of my life through my email.  You’d be missing some details for sure, but you could.  You could see the relationships as they are: families, friends, others.  Potentials on their way to becoming actuals.  Plans form in steps: coming out, going out, coming home (wherever home is).  Things coming together and sometimes falling apart.  The insignifant things on par with the very significant.  No record however, of how signifcant.  No ticker to say how many times I’ve read this email, how long I spent with it, how long I spent crafting a response in a way that reflects my true feelings.  The times I’ve looked at an email thinking about saying something, really wanting to say something, then deciding it would be best not to.  Or the times I give in and send off a response that I may or may not regret later.  The travails I’m having in my personal life.  My thoughts towards some people in the emails goes unsaid, at least for now.

Combine my emails with my viewing history around those emails and you get a more fleshed in picture of my life.  You see when I’m trying to figure out something, trying to put pieces of a puzzle together for myself.  Trying to figure out what something means.  It would also show my comforts, those sites I go to when I need a distraction or I want something to cheer me up, sometimes the places I go when I’m bored.  But this still doesn’t show the times when I need the silence, I crave it like I crave kisses and I crave talking and on some rare days I crave chocolate (usually it’s something else).

For some people my conversations and my relationship with them is mostly or purely digital.  Sometimes this is hard to do, hard to find the depth in meaning that type-written words that have no physical existence.  I crave that physical existence.  Sometimes I find it in their company.  Sometimes I feel like printing out the words just to give them some kind of physical existence.  Sometimes that’s my only comfort, lacking the physical touch, the words given form by ink and paper will have to do. 😦