When I was a kid, as now, I had an extremely active imagination. One of the games I used to play frequently was this: when in the car, going over a hill or around the corner, I would imagine that on the other side there would be an ocean. There would be a sparkling seashore with a town nestled at the water’s edge and we would be driving toward it, instead of wherever it was that we were actually going (the grocery store, school, etc.). And even though it never happened, I retained that childlike faith in the one-day appearance of that Mythic Ocean for many years. If not this time, then maybe the next. But each failure took its tiny toll; it’s the same feeling you get when you realize you haven’t won the lottery. There was that brief moment that you thought, “Well . . . maybe,” and then that tiniest of hopes was dashed. You probably barely noticed it was gone.

Right after I moved to San Francisco in my mid-twenties, I found myself on a bus on a quiet street (the buses in that city are electric, and run connected to wires above the street). The bus mounted a hill and then turned left across the pinnacle. I looked down and there was my Mythic Ocean. Okay, not technically an Ocean but a Bay, San Francisco Bay, which is cooler than any real ocean anyway because it has Alcatrazz in the middle of it. It was a very brief moment, maybe two or three seconds before the bus passed out of view of the Bay, but it was as though that childhood hope against hope had been handed to me on a silver platter. It wasn’t magical in the supernatural sense, but it was the closest I’ve ever come. It wasn’t an actualization, but more of a teaser-trailer. This is what it will be like.

And yet I still haven’t given up on the Mythical Ocean. That one is still out there, lurking, waiting. Someday, I continue to believe, I will turn a corner in Waco, Texas or Kansas City, Missouri and there it will be, glittering, sailboats skittering across its surface.

I just realized the other day that this same hope exists, albeit on a much smaller scale, in my gmail. Every time I look and see that the tab reading Gmail – Inbox has become Gmail – Inbox (1), indicating the arrival of something new, that same small hope whispers to me: This is it! This could be the one! The email that you’ve been waiting for! Now, What the content of that Magic Email might be, I don’t know. Maybe that I’ve been recognized as the rightful ruler of Bhutan. Maybe that a movie producer has deciced to option a story I wrote my junior year of college called “Conscience and the Letter Q.” The little hopelet that rears up in me never gets very far in its fevered reasoning. It just shouts This is it! and lets me fill in the details.

But unlike oceans, which rarely turn up unexpectedly, sometimes you do get nice emails, like the one that told me that I was nominated for an Eisner for Jack of Fables (I lost, but not via email). Which maybe makes it all the worse when you realize that your new email is for penis enlargement, or a forwarded joke from your wife’s aunt, God bless her, or just some seemingly random string of Cyrillic characters, that may contain the secrets of the Universe, but probably are also advertising penis enlargement. Email hopes are dashed in degrees.

Still, the hope remains. Somewhere in The Sentimental Education, Flaubert notes that the excitement of visiting a prostitute for the first time turned out to be far more pleasurable than the act itself (or something along those lines; it’s been years). Maybe this is the allure of the Mythic Ocean and the Magic Email. They are embodied anticipation. They will never come, and that makes the hope for them remain utterly pure.