Is There a Word for This?

[akirlu]

...the feeling of being simultaneously melancholy and creeped out, as in when you're clearing out some of your gargantuan backlog of unfiled e-mails, and come across messages from people who are dead now? They're still as breathlessly immediate as the day I got them. I cannot bring myself to delete any of those, however trivial. It seems dismissive, disrespectful, to just cast them into the outer darkness of forgetting. Am I psycho, or what?

Comments

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

No.

For years I was afraid to write letters, because of the permanent immdiacy of them. I've even written a poem about the problem (of which only the kernal is worth keeping... yearbooks, and old love letters; left with the last page first).

A letter (even in e-mail) is a crystalised moment.

I recently came upon letters Maia sent me, after I deployed but before I was overseas. Painful. Reading the stuff I wrote then... well part of the reason I wrote it was to remember. Seeing it in Chunga today was more potent than the photos I was scanning from Walter Reed.

We are evanescent, and memory is all that survives us (any afterlife is ineffable) so those who were dear, and are gone, who wants to let them go completely.

As you said, it is the outer darkness.

I'm just glad I'm not in that list.

Love,

Terry

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, a lot of us, me included, are very glad you are not on the list.

Love,

me