Dear Mom,

This is the first letter. I am writing it at the community center on a Tuesday evening. Mrs. Martha says I should write to someone I love. I said my mother. She did not ask why I never write. She just handed me a sheet of paper and a pen. The paper is thick and cream-colored. The pen is cheap. I am writing this letter even though I will not send it. That is how it begins. I delete things for a living. I delete fifty thousand things every day. I sit in a small office in Columbus, Ohio, in front of three monitors, and I delete the internet's garbage.

Dear Mom,

This is the second letter. I wrote it last night at my kitchen table. The apartment is quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator. I wrote about my work. I wrote about how I delete things. I wrote about the flyer that Mrs. Martha taught me to keep. I wrote about how some things in the garbage are not garbage at all. I folded the letter and put it in a drawer. Next to my keys and my wallet. I will write another one tomorrow.

Dear Mom,

This is the letter from Saturday at the community center. Four people attended class today. Two old people. A woman in her forties who looked lost. And me. Martha said I have gotten better at writing. She did not say the words exactly like that but her eyes said it. Her hands look like they have written ten thousand letters. Maybe they have. She is sixty-eight, maybe seventy. She has silver hair and glasses on a chain and patience that I cannot understand. Nobody does anymore, she said, when I told her I did not know how to write letters. That's the point.

Dear Mom,

This is the letter I wrote the day my boss noticed. He stood over my desk with an expression caught between anger and confusion. You're keeping junk, he said. You're not deleting the junk. They're not junk, I said. They have no value, he said. They have value, I said. What value? he said. I did not know. I do not know. But deleting them feels like deleting something that matters. Like deleting a heartbeat. Like deleting a voice in the dark saying I am here.

From: Danny Miller To: Mrs. Martha Subject: I won't be able to make it Saturday

Dear Mrs. Martha,

I am writing to tell you that I cannot come to class this Saturday. I have a lot of work. I am deleting fifty thousand things every day and my speed has dropped. My boss is not happy. He keeps looking at my numbers and then looking at me the way you look at a machine that is not performing. I do not know why I am writing this email. I am not sorry I cannot come. I am sorry for nothing. I just wanted to say I am sorry.

Dear Mom,

This is the letter I wrote when I found out that the garbage was changing. More and more of it was the same kind of thing I had been saving. People writing I AM HERE in the margins of the internet. In ways that could not be tracked. Could not be measured. Could not be deleted without deleting something that was, by any rational metric, worthless. I created a new folder. I named it: I AM HERE. And I put every piece of junk I could not delete inside it.

Dear Mom,

This is the letter I wrote last night. I have written so many letters now. They fill a drawer in my apartment. Next to my keys and my wallet and a battery that died three years ago and will never work again. I continue deleting fifty thousand things every day. I continue going to the community center on Saturdays. I continue writing letters to you that I never send. My life does not change. I do not quit my job. I do not run away. I do not become a different person.

I simply continue to be a person who deletes fifty thousand things every day and keeps the ones that remind me that I am alive.

That is all. That is everything.

With love, Danny

P.S. Martha says next week we will learn to write poems. I do not know if I can do that. Poetry has no metric. Poetry cannot be measured. But maybe that is the point.

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