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 meredith,
do you remember? it was you and megan and me, the trio of Midlands Elite Gymnastics Academy, a preschool by a highway in rural South Carolina for little kids interested in learning how to read and write and spin on a bar like we didn’t have bones in our bodies. megan was outgoing and good at everything, and you were a little quieter and intense, like me. i haven’t ever forgotten the first time you two came over for a slumber party, my first time ever having friends over to spend the night. you were nervous to stay the night in a new house, and your dad ended up coming to take you home before it was time for us to get in our sleeping bags and watch a movie.
we were so small. your dad came through the front door, a concerned look on his face, and swept you up into his arms. i remember you wiping the tears from your red cheeks. i was worried you might be embarrassed for leaving the slumber party early. i wanted to write you a letter that said i’m scared too. i would always rather sleep in my own bed. and yes, my stomach also hurts from all the gummy candy we ate. but we were six, so i just watched you go, waved goodbye, said i can’t wait to see you on monday at school.
since six, friendship has been more fraught than slumber parties and sleeping bags. i feel the need to justify this so you don’t think i grew into some kind of circus freak. i feel lonely sometimes, but i’ve been beyond lucky in love. it feels like there are three nice straight men around my age left on the planet and i’ve kissed them all. i’m so close with my mom and my sibling that we frequently are able to literally read each other’s minds. and i do have friendships that span time zones and continents, which is very lucky (couches to crash on everywhere!) but also makes a saturday morning coffee date nearly impossible.
but still, since six, friendship has been hard. i’ve realized in my late twenties that i have unrealistic expectations. i’m serious, careening on intense, when it comes to being someone’s friend. if i consider someone a pal, i will literally die for them. a secret? it goes into a bulletproof, guarded vault. i will drop anything, everything, for a friend who needs a favor. but that isn’t totally healthy and it’s certainly not fair for me to expect all of that from my own friends. but then again, when a friendship is new and we don’t know each other’s life stories yet, or it doesn’t have that intensity, sometimes it feels like a performance. it’s like everyone else got a script and i’m bumbling behind, trying to make up words everyone else seems to know by heart. and god, the heartbreak! i’ve gotten my heart broken by men but nothing has compared to the high school heartbreak of being left out by the girls i loved.
just before first grade, my family left the town where you and megan and me were a trio of little girls learning how to ride bikes and turn cartwheels and be good people. i don’t remember your last name or know where you went to high school. i don’t know whether you have oodles of girlfriends, if your twenties have been full of bachelorette parties, or if you spend most Saturdays training for a marathon or learning how to sew. does your phone light up with group texts or do you prefer your standing sunday facetime with your friend who lives across the country?
wherever you are, i hope you know that there is a person out there who remembers you with so much love, who remembers how it felt to sit next to you on a blue carpet and recognize something. i’ve always liked to do things on my own, i’ve always been stubbornly independent, and there was something in the six year old me that saw that in you.
i feel like such a loner sometimes, like there’s a blinking light hanging over my head: girl has not had a friday night plan in 19 days! and then i think about all of the versions of you that could exist, maybe out to dinner with your husband and his friend, maybe living at home, taking care of your mom or dad, maybe in a tiny apartment down the street from mine hosting band practice, and i realize it doesn’t matter. it doesn’t matter if you have sixty friends or if you love your pet turtle more than any warm blooded human. you’re still a girl who learned how to read, elbow bumping into mine. we’re all loners, a little bit, aren’t we?
i recently read a novel called beautyland about a girl who lives a normal life in northern philly with her beautiful, smart mom. except she isn’t a normal girl, she’s an alien. she communicates with her alien home by sending faxes from a fax machine her mom rescued from the trash. something in me felt so much relief when i read that book, the same way something in six-year-old me felt relief at recognizing something in six-year-old you. that relief was spelled like this: sometimes my heart feels like a fax machine culled from the trash. it just acts so DIFFERENT than everyone else’s. sometimes it sputters and the ink smears. sometimes it glitches and resends the same fax 19 times until the galaxy writes back: chill out!!! it was a beautiful book about love and loneliness and what it is to be a human and when i read it, i felt less alone. like maybe i’m not included in the of group text, but i am loved and have been loved in ways that leave me short of breath. maybe i feel like an alien, but aliens love in their own sticky, remarkable way. and i thought about you, meredith, my first-best friend. i wrote a message in pencil on a piece of paper, plugged in my fax-machine-heart, and sent it to you: hello meredith, i hope you are healthy and happy and living a life that is full of blueberries and weekends spent doing exactly what you want and cartwheels, still. love, stuart
just a reminder that this is a pay what you wish substack. if you do not have $ for yet another Substack, venmo me any amount between 1 and 1 million dollars and I will be delighted to comp you. include your email address in the venmo to @stupennebaker or DM (i think you can do that now?) me here.
thank you so much for reading!!! you can find all of the books mentioned here or anywhere else on my substack on Bookshop.
you can also find me rarely here and more often here and I would love to be friends (if i haven’t scared you off yet, ha!). see you in april for the next installment of shelf life.
Mer!
sweetest thing I’ve ever read