Return to Sender

I thought it was an urban myth: The E-mail That Was Sent That Didn’t Arrive But Didn’t Bounce Back Either (cue appropriate orchestral swelling). I especially thought it was a myth when it came to men – something people (OK, sometimes me) tried to use when instead we should have just accepted: "Hey, he’s just not that into you."

But I have actual proof that there are lost emails floating around in cyberspace.

Today, literally as I was trying to compose the appropriately casual email to The Guy about whether we were on for this evening (having wrestled with the issue of whether to write at all and decided I had to give it a shot) came an email from The Guy himself about… whether we were on for this evening.

Not 15 minutes into the evening, he asked me a question where the answer was something I had written him in my last email – the one he hadn’t responded to. His memory is even scarier than mine, so I found it surprising that he wouldn’t remember something I’d written him only a few days ago. I answered his question and said something like, "As I told you in my email." He looked blank, and so I asked if he remembered something else I’d written in that same email. He didn’t.

"I never got that email," he said. "When did you send it?"

I told him, and we both started laughing about wondering what each of us had said that the other had found so offensive to prompt radio silence on both ends.

(Question for Reading Groups: Is it a good thing or a bad thing that I’ve met someone who’s apparently as paranoid as I am? Discuss.)