Exhausted, we were sitting on my office floor in the dark. It was the end of a interminable, excruciating breakup conversation, and my newest ex had one last request of me. "Please," she grabbed my arm. "Please don't put me in that awful Estranged folder."
The Estranged folder is where old email goes after I've booted someone out of my life. (Okay, a few estrangees just disappeared on their own.) I don't want to throw out our history, but I don't exactly want to look at their names every day, either—voila, the Estranged folder. It's populated mostly by former love interests, but there are a smattering of friends and family in there, too. It used to have just two subfolders, but it quickly swelled. A few years ago, the number of folders under Estranged began to outnumber the number of "good standing" folders, which was a sobering moment. Now it's a 2:1 ratio, estranged-to-not. When the number of onetime friends with whom you never speak outnumbers the number of friends you've still got, it gives one pause. I've decided it's a normal part of life, that of course as I get older I'll accumulate more dead relationships, but still. To see it neatly quantified is downright numbing. It's a monument to my own romantic and social futility.
It feels like a big win, then, when someone makes the reverse trip—moving back out from under the Estranged node. It's happened three times, now. It feels like when your team hangs a loss on the division leader—this win counts double in the standings.