Welcome to missed connection where I recommend a book to someone I was too distant from or distracted by or shy to actually… recommend a book to.
Dear Lisbeth,
It seems we’re sharing a phone number. Sharing, shared, or maybe it’s just the combination of digits you hastily punched into a website you were 99% sure might give your computer a virus, but would let you watch the movie Pauline at the Beach free of charge. Maybe you just plucked 10 numbers out of the universe and those 10 numbers turned out to be mine. Whatever the reason, I’m the woman at the other end of that string of digits, and I’ve been receiving your messages. Every day. Every single day, someone texts me, looking for Lisbeth. Does she still wants a loan, a side gig, a free pair of ray-bans? Does she have a moment to speak? These texts are usually misspelled and often contain links that I am sure would do something permanent and damaging to my phone.
The constant barrage of spam texts to you, Lisbeth, has changed how I use my phone. I have a do not disturb filter always on, so now I only receive texts and calls if it’s someone in my contacts. Maybe I should thank you—maybe I’m using my phone less because I’m running from something, because it’s strange to look down at my phone and see all these messages for someone else. It makes my phone a fiction of sorts and it’s started leaking into my fingertips. On my walk home from work a few weeks ago, I checked my texts and had more than usual Lisbeth messages, six or seven. Was I Lisbeth?, my end-of-day brain wondered. I was ready to be back in my apartment, my eyes were tired from looking at emails, I felt both too far from home and very close at the same time. Was Lisbeth me? It was still sunny, not even six yet, but I felt a cloud of something slip over me. At work recently, we got on the topic of shadow selves: the version of oneself that doesn’t align with who they think they are; one’s counterweight. I wondered if mine had escaped from the dark corners of my brain and crept, somehow, into real life.
Last week, I got on a train in the middle of the night and got off in a small town in Virginia. A car took me up a mountain, down a gravel driveway, and dropped me off in front of a barn. I haven’t left since. I’ve been running through meadows, saying good morning to the groundhog that lives behind the studio I’m writing you from and good night to the cows that eat dinner at the same time as all twenty or so of us artists who have reported for duty at the dusk of summer, our paintbrushes and pens and cameras at the ready. It took my brain a moment to adjust from city to country, but not as long as I expected. I like quiet, as it turns out. I’ve been writing and it’s been coming easily, for once. I’m writing on legal pads, on my computer, sleeping hard, taking breaks for black coffee and an occasional run or swim, then spending the evening listening to music or watching the US Open with the other writers and artists who are here, working in rooms next to mine. I have not asked them if they have a Lisbeth. Maybe I should. Maybe in another world, you’re sitting on a couch with brand new friends, people you didn’t know existed just a few days ago, talking about strange texts you’ve been receiving. Who is Stuart, I imagine you asking. Who could this person be?
Today I was wandering through a maze of hedges and sculptures, past a row of wildflowers, when I realized I hadn’t received a Lisbeth text since I left the city. For a moment, I felt like the wind had gotten knocked out of me. Where had you gone? I double checked my phone, triple checked again just now, after writing this.
Lisbeth, you’ve been left alone.
Lisbeth, I’m living in and around all this green, all this quiet space, and reading a book about paradise.
Lisbeth, are you out there? Are you real?
This book is called State of Paradise and is about a woman whose sister vanishes during a mysterious flood in Florida. I love novels about Florida. I love Florida, is what I’m trying to say. I love places that are hot and complicated and surrounded by water. But this version of Florida is even stranger: there’s a cult in the living room, a neighbor whose presence almost glitches, in and out, like a scratched record. Things feel familiar and real, and then not at all. This version of Florida has been ravaged by technology and climate change. But it also feels only tenuously fictional. If that makes sense? On the internet, another place that feels fictional, the place you’re reading this letter, State of Paradise is described as a “sticky” book. I think that’s right. When I put it down, it feels hard to reorient myself to the world around me, the trees that are firmly rooted, that ground that is not squelching beneath my feet after a hard, sudden rain. I keep looking over my shoulder. It doesn’t seem too hard to imagine that you, Lisbeth, could exist somewhere nearby. It’s not often that a work of fiction seeps into the world around me in such a physical way, and it’s a weird feeling, one I’m kind of in awe of, like the last time I pushed through the subway turnstile too quickly and bruised the top of my thigh, a violent shade of purple blooming on my skin. How could my body make that color?
What do you think, Lisbeth?
Take care,
Stuart