His Last Unsent Email

The Draft Folder

The email had been sitting in his drafts folder for three years.

She only found it because she was looking for something else entirely. She guessed his password, it was the same one for years, their old car with some symbols and their names added. He always said what is there to hide in my emails, even if someone steals my password all they will find is spam and bills. She had been looking for the car insurance, the electricity bill, the internet bill and Customer ID, for god’s sake. All of it had become her responsibility now and nobody thinks to keep these things in a shared folder, do they. He saved everything in his drafts folder. His thoughts, his actual drafts rightly so, his songs, anything he needed to find quickly. Drafts folder.

She was not looking for an email to herself.

But there it was. Her name in the To field. No subject line. Dated a Sunday afternoon in September, three years ago. A Sunday she could not place. An ordinary Sunday, apparently. The kind that rings no bells at all.

She sat down at his desk and looked around. All the papers he always seemed to collect for no particular reason. A permanent chaos of cables, wires, things, four pairs of glasses, a row of tubes of creams to keep him young which never worked, and his laptop surrounded by at least ten attached accessories. Let me live in my mess, at least I know where everything is, he always said, whenever she compared her neat desk with what she privately called his Tsunami room.

She started to read.

It was not long. He had always been a man of too many words but this was not long. Maybe because it was unfinished, she thought. Four paragraphs. Maybe two hundred words. The kind of letter that takes fifteen minutes to write.

He said he had been watching her that morning. Pottering around the kitchen making Sunday breakfast. Looking out of the window at nothing in particular while she sautéed the fresh tomatoes from their farm patch. And he had felt something so large and so specific that he had needed to put it somewhere before the day swallowed it whole.

He said she was the only person he had ever wanted to be ordinary with. That the extraordinary parts of life, the holidays, the milestones, the celebrations, all of it was background noise compared to a Sunday mornings. A Thursday evenings. The nothing days when they were just two people hanging around doing absolutely nothing remarkable.

Except the breakfasts. Those were always remarkable.

He said his favourite part of the day, of the week, of his life, was the time spent around her doing absolutely nothing at all.

He said he had never told her this because it had always felt too simple to say out loud. Like admitting you loved breathing. Did not sound romantic enough. And he knew how much she liked romance.

He had not sent it.

She did not know why. She would never know why. Maybe he had felt silly. Maybe the moment passed and the Sunday moved into Monday and his mind went into the work stress that always hits by Sunday evening the email stayed where it was, in a drafts folder he probably forgot about, waiting quietly in the dark for three years for her to find it.

She sat at his desk for a long time.

Outside the window she could hear the group of elderly people laughing in the park. Not laughing because someone said something funny. Laughing because somewhere along the way someone had decided that if you force yourself to laugh out loud for three minutes every morning you will feel better. Or breathe better. Or something. Every park in India now has a battalion of seniors laughing on purpose at six in the morning, their forced ha ha ha echoing through the trees and sounding considerably more sinister than any Ravana ever managed in a TV serial.

She took a deep breath. Opened her mouth wide, relaxed her jaw, and let out a loud Ha Ha Ha deliberately.

She stopped halfway as she choked on her laughter and her tears at the same time.

She picked up her phone. She opened her email. She typed his address into the To field from memory.

She wrote three words.

I know. Me too.

She pressed send.

She knew exactly where it would go.

Ping! 

She smiled as she saw his inbox open on the laptop, showing one unread email. 

---

**Ravana: google it if you don’t know 👺