#draft folder

(things he almost said / almost sent / absolutely should not be trusted with a phone at 2:13am)

- a text he deleted immediately: “you ate today, right?” followed by a second draft: “don’t lie to me. i can tell.”

- “your hair was still damp when you fell asleep on my shoulder. now my shirt smells like you.”

- a note in his drafts titled ‘don’t send’: “i think i’m starting to plan my day around when i’ll see you again.”

- “don't look at me like that in front of other people again. i won't be responsible for what happens.”

- “i fixed your door lock. it was loose. you didn’t notice. you never notice when i’m trying to make things easier for you.”

- a half-finished message he never sent: “if you ever need someone to go with you, anywhere, you just say it. i’ll be there.”

and the worst one, deleted after 40 seconds of staring at it:

- “come home safe"

From the infinite basement of wonders that is my draft folder.

Every so often, someone will ask, on Twitter:

Which would scare you more: your twitter DMs going public or the tweets in your drafts folder going live?

In general, I don’t know about my DMs. Some might be embarrassing, but most would merely be boring as hell; messages to friends, private conversations in which confidences are exchanged, congratulations messages… in other words, pretty much just another WhatsApp or groups of text messages.

But my Drafts Folder? My heavens, if that went live, I’d have to go into hiding. I don’t know how other people use it but with the rare exceptions of tweets that are boilerplates, used to reply to equally boilerplated insults or sealioning…

…the overwhelming majority of them are of the ‘I’m very very angry, but just sensible enough not to hit SEND on this one’. I clear the latter out every do often. Once upon a time, there’d be a couple of dozen every three months. And I’d tweet about the deletions, self-mockingly.

These days, I’ve stopped doing that, because when I clear them out from the iPhone and iPad, there are hundreds I’m deleting… hundreds per month.

It’s probably not healthy to keep them until deletion.