I Hope This Email Never Finds You

I hope this email does not find you well.
I hope this email does not find you
And instead arrives to a desk overgrown with moss,
Lit quietly by a shard of light through your collapsed apartment ceiling
And that the silence that it finds there is simply deafening.

I hope this email does not find you
And that it goes around the corner to your kitchen
Where your discarded dishes stand like lichened towers,
And that it will not find you staring into the refrigerator
Saying “There’s nothing to eat,” to the bread and eggs and strawberries – long gone.
I hope that you are nowhere to be found.

I hope this email does not find you
Scouring the bathtub, dusting cobwebs out of cupboards.
I hope the ivy has taken over the couch
And surrounded all the cushions, blanketed the armrests.
I hope that birds are nesting in your wifi router
And that a family of squirrels has made a home in your utensil drawer.

I hope this email does not find you
Because you are far away and doing something gorgeous,
And that you haven’t given me a second thought.
I hope this email never finds you.
I hope this email never catches up.

Reprinted with permission. First appeared in Apricity Magazine.

From the artist: I wrote this while quarantined in my tiny 6th floor walkup apartment and clearly could not wait to get out. Those 10 days felt very long, and I hope that when we all have the opportunity to get far away from these stationary years, we'll run very, very far.

Anna Stacy (they/she) is an actor, writer, and soon-to-be emergency physician. Anna’s writing has appeared in Calyx, Carve, Intima, and Academic Emergency Medicine, and can be found on-screen in the award-winning series Dead-Enders. For more on what Anna does when they should be studying, check out their website.