A story · House of Bridges
The Draft Folder
A short interactive story about a woman doing a boring inbox cleanup who finds a folder of unsent messages to her ex — one from right after, one from the middle, one from a month ago. You choose what she does with each; there are four possible endings.
It is a Sunday afternoon and Ivy is doing the most boring possible task — unsubscribing from newsletters she never reads, the kind of admin that feels productive without costing anything — when she notices, tucked below eleven promotional emails from a shoe website, a folder she forgot existed.
Drafts. 3 items.
She knows immediately what they are, the way you know a scar under a sleeve before you've looked at it. She opens the folder anyway.
Three messages to Milo, never sent, dated across seven months like little fossils — each one, she can already tell without opening a single one, a different temperature entirely. March was four days after he left. October was a month ago, which unsettles her more than March does; March at least has an excuse.
She sits back in her chair. The cursor hovers over the oldest one.
Nobody made her open this folder today. She could have deleted the whole thing sight unseen, the way you'd throw out a box without checking what's inside it, and probably nothing would be lost that matters. Instead here she is, on a Sunday, about to read three versions of herself she hasn't looked at directly in a while.
She clicks the first one.