Emails I Never Sent: Selections From the 1,277 Messages in My Gmail Drafts Folder

by Lucy Lindsey

Lucy Lindsey writes a lot of emails, twelve hundred of which she has never sent. She looked back and chose a few.

June 6, 2006. An email to my then-crush:

today at work in the garden, i saw a big white spider with a smaller brown spider riding on its butt, and an even smaller black spider riding on its face.

pretty scary, huh?

October 11, 2006. I guess there was a time when I thought I might like to spend a year studying puppetry in Turkey:

Hello!

I just found your website online, and I wanted to email you immediately. I am a student in Boston, MA, USA, and I am in the process of applying for a fellowship for travel and study next year (starting October 2007). I want to propose to travel in Turkey, and to work for part of the time for a Turkish shadow puppet maker and performer. You have a beautiful and comprehensive site; I am wondering if you are still active in terms of performance and the craft of your puppets, and also if you accept or are looking for volunteer workers or apprentices. Please let me know if you would be interested in a volunteer, and I can tell you more about myself!

May 12, 2007. Ha, this one is to Gregg Gillis:

hey gregg, this is a funny piece of information to relay, but i had a dream that i was at one of your shows, and things went wrong technically (this was clearly inspired by your providence show), and so you just left some music playing on stage and we went to the back of the club and you played some short clips that you were thinking about, and told me how you were dissatisfied with your shows, and we talked about it. it was a weird dream.

providence was pretty nuts, lots of insane pushing around, but i thought you weathered the crazy bouncers and the crowd pretty well.

June 18, 2007. This was addressed to two people I used to live with:

i meant to ask you this in the kitchen months ago, like 5 seconds after you said that i didn’t seem like someone who cried a lot, buuuuut, last night i saw alfred brendel play a piano concerto in amsterdam and i cried a little bit because the man’s like 75, you know? and here he was still playing the piano. well suddenly it popped into my head ‘oh yeah both of you guys said i didn’t seem like someone who cried,’ so i’m still wondering what this means, or basically what about me seems like someone who doesn’t cry?

June 27, 2008. Thank god I was interrupted:

I am on the bus to boston, and i have gotten to thinking. Seeing how funny they obviously thought it was (reprising not once but twice, in dramatic form), and seeing how ultimately inconsequential to the plot it was (presented as a harbinger of doom, but never quite living up to the promise of true evil), i have come to the conclusion that the writers of the simpsons came up with the spiderpig song way before they put the pig in the movie, perhaps even before they decided

August 27, 2008. Here’s a window into exactly how crazed I got about bedbugs in 2008:

add to the list of weird things i have seen since i started my hyper-vigilant watchfulness:
-crazy bug running wildly down the wall
-very thin tiny white worm squirming in my bed
-very disgusting huge white worm living in my bed (in my dream)
-bizarre oily skin of who knows what

and now

-bug running around on pigeon’s back, then slipping in between an imperceptible break in feathers

it’s crazy what you see when you really start to look!

November 11, 2008. To a friend, unknown what I was talking about:

oh that’s easy, you just coat his thumb in molasses and stick tacks to it, upside down. easy peasy.

see?

Lucy Lindsey lives in New York City.

Illustration by Aurora Andrews.