The year is 2156. Only 0.0000017% of the world remember the ancient art of handwritten letters. I am one of them. I reincarnated specifically for this reason. To come back and write emails, without AI. Yes, I would come back just to write emails. I love emails. I love it when they find me well, which is not often. I love writing them.

I don’t know when it started, this love for emails. I used to dread emails. When I started my career, emails were this serious delicate thing that could land you in jail. They are still those things, but I have outgrown the fear. I like to see them as a dance. A delicate dance between humans through the witchcraft that the internet is. When I receive an email, I like to pick up the voice in them. If it is from someone I know, I read it out in their voice, and accent. I animate the email. It is much more fun. I want to feel he soul behind an email. It is even more interesting when I attempt to decode a voice through the email’s sentence structure.

I have read very detailed emails. Emails that were drafted with all hands on deck. Long and full of context. Sometimes, borderline boring because they are too detailed. But I love them. I love it when people geek out about the things they care about in an email. I can tell they are going the extra mile to ensure they are not misunderstood, but mostly they are doing it for the love of the game. They are not always the most effective, these long stories, but I am a sucker for details, and random information I will never use except in a very rare trivia.

My favourite emails are those that read like a chat. No greetings, one sentence, ‘Sent from my iPhone’. I imagine the write responding to my emails in a board meeting, waiting for men and women in suits to explain to them why they are behind their Q1 targets. Or perhaps from the back of a dark tinted SUV heading to the airport to fly out to the regional office. There are no ‘regards’ in such emails, just a name, or initials. These are emails from someone with skin in the game. No stories, just execution.

I received a mad email once. Red font, caps, and an ‘I COMMAND YOU’, thrown in a sentence like teargas in a protest. It was a mass email. An email sent to delinquents for not completing a company mandated thing, which I don’t remember. I thought I was in a simulation. It was so absurd, I thought it would make great fiction about life in an asylum. It needed to see a therapist for its anger issues, this email.

“Hope this mail finds you well and also you family well.

We have had the worst winter in 70 years, by way of cold and rain.

Unbelievable.”

Now, this is an email that found me well. An email that was loved at home. An email that was not written from within the white walls of a soul-less corporate office. It was written in winter, but it warmed my heart. It read like a letter written before fax and emails. I could picture them writing it by a fireside, water boiling in a kettle in the background, as the harsh winter raged on relentlessly outside. What an email. Unbelievable!

I hope the emails are finding you well this Monday morning.