Six months later:

From: Stamford IT
To: zzzz-All
Date: July 8, 2007 08:30 A.M.
Subject: E-mail Maintenance

Dunder Mifflin Stamford Employees,
Please take the time to go through your e-mail and clean out any personal messages and any messages in your Deleted or Bulk folders. The lack of upkeep with employees' e-mail accounts over the past few months has caused the server to be running at a much slower rate than is acceptable. Please take care of this as soon as possible.
Thank you.

Jim had never gotten himself into the habit of cleaning out his spam mail folder. But over his months at Dunder Mifflin Stamford, his Bulk box had collected over three hundred spam messages. After hitting "Ctrl-A" to highlight all messages, Jim's index finger hovered over the delete key.

"So, Big Tuna. Guess how many messages I had to delete." Andy turned around in his chair.

"Five thousand," Jim said dryly without looking up.

"Try two!" Andy said triumphantly.

"Wow. You are efficient," Jim said, looking up at Andy, his expression neutral. Behind him, he heard Karen exhale a hidden laugh through her nose.

"Got that right. I bet you're not nearly as efficient. How many do you have to delete?"

"About three hundred."

"Wow, Tuna, you so need to get on top of your game."

"Uh-huh," Jim said, staring back at his screen.

Andy looked at Jim for a few moments longer, perturbed that he'd begun to ignore him, and then swiveled his chair back around with a huff to face his own computer.

Jim's mouth curled up in victory, and he went back to deleting his e-mails. At the last second before hitting "delete", he decided to scan his e-mails to make sure nothing of importance had gone in the Bulk folder by accident. His heart stopped when he saw her name. An e-mail with no subject from Pam stared him in the face from his bulk folder. His heart sputtered and then restarted again as he tried not to get his hopes up.

For the first few months after leaving Scranton, Jim had tried his best to forget Pam. The meaningful goodbye they'd shared in the parking lot before he left was his closure. She had made it clear to him that she wasn't leaving Roy, so there was nothing left for Jim to do but move on. He'd jumped into his new responsibilities in Stamford eagerly, leaving as little free time for his mind to wander as possible. The scars that began to heal over were bruised again when he heard about Pam and Roy's breakup from everyone other than Pam herself. When it was clear that she wasn't going to contact him, he resolved to move on once more. Though as the months went by, he found himself thinking about her, wondering what she was doing now that she'd broken things off with Roy. He found himself hoping she was pursuing art, wondering what her apartment looked like. It didn't hurt so much anymore to reminisce about their friendship.

So he wasn't surprised to find himself flooded with joy mixed with a little bit of anxiety over this old e-mail from Pam in his Bulk folder. It had no subject line, and was only 1KB in size. It must have been a mistake. Maybe she'd tried to send him something, and gave up when no words came to her. She'd clicked the button by accident, maybe. The only thing he could do was to open it and find out. Slowly, he watched the mouse cursor as he directed it over the e-mail and double-clicked. The window popped open, and there were two small words. Two words that changed everything.

"Come back," it said.

Six months ago, she'd asked him to come back, and it had gone to his bulk folder because of the lack of subject line and number of words. Six months ago, his dreams became a reality, and he didn't even know it.

His fingers flew like lightning as he typed a response, and then another when she didn't answer back within three minutes.

To Be Continued...