The Book of Tells

Boys are trouble.
Thorny (I said THorny) friendships, sticky (in the sense of tricky, not in the sense of commitment god forbid) relationships, torment -- these are my special skills. I guess I like the tumult, or am a sucker for pain, or enjoy the tangle.
Or maybe it's just a habit.
There a few books that should be required reading for people like us, and the one I am liking best is The Mind that Changes Itself because it has nothing whatsoever to do with "self help" but rather is a beautifully and kindly written explanation of a frontier of brain science that suggests our "brains" are actually our "minds" -- and that patterns of thought become entrenched in the moorings and make-up of the brain as an organ in the same way muscle memory becomes nature to an athlete. We just get used to thinking in certain patterns and the very good news is, we can unlearn these patterns pretty easily. How encouraging!
Now, if I really took this book to heart I wouldn't be reading the other stuff I am, but I am....I find myself re-reading emails I've collected in a file called "Walter". This is not his name, and I didn't create this file but it was on my computer from the last user and so it now houses the correspondence of my ex-love and me, and is as close as I may come to the testament and truth of what was between us. I find reading it useful to reassure myself that I am not crazy, that those sentiments really were as real as black and white. Or flashing pixels. That the sentiment was shared, at least briefly.
I wonder if this will now replace "letters", the way we know of artists and writers and thinkers of the past. If stupid mis-typed and poorly spelled jokes or the quotidien details -- "Went for a run and then ate some porridge, yum!" will become the means by which we come to know the inner workings of minds great and not so.
It is certainly a torture to re-read these things. While there is "I love you" and then the less incriminating "love you" and plenty of "I miss you" and "You were on my shoulder all day today" there is also....the absence. Gaps we didn't see the first time. We read email with a certain framework, through eyes that belong to a mind that is convinced of something. It is not the same as something written down on paper -- though the look of the printed word is similar (how were we to know that of ALL the dumb classes we took in highschool, the one one we really needed was typing??) it is actually and truly less stable. The medium is the message, oh yes the medium really IS the message -- so much is mis-read, misinterpreted, hastily and poorly understood.
On this we will create the knowledge of the temper of our times. On these seemingly ephemeral texts we will base biographies and histories. (We know of course there is NOTHING ephemeral about email, it is most persistent as well as often pernicious.) Probably not a good thing. It isn't even a good way to understand the workings of our own hearts, and the hearts of those we thought we knew.