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.

About the Author

Anna Stacy (they/she) is a writer, actor, and multi-tasker from New York. Their writing has appeared in Calyx, the Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, Intima, and Academic Emergency Medicine, as well as on-screen in the award-winning series Dead-Enders. They are completing an M.D. at the Icahn School of Medicine. For more on what Anna does when they should be studying, check out their website: anna-stacy.squarespace.com.