pages we numbered

a message i'm too afraid to send.

Dear “L”:

How often do you think about us, when it was just us and not you and me?

How often do you think about the notebooks? Notebooks that we strapped with duct tape decorated with stars and rubber bands? They would hold mythical spells and the latest chapter of our new fantasy novel and elaborate plans for an eight-episode season of a TV show about magic musicians that we planned to both film and star in, which would never materialize.

Do you hear the notes like I do, a chord that feels unfinished, hanging in the air?

You said it yourself so eloquently so many years ago. I think it was maybe 2019, the edge of a growingly distant reality. Why do we talk so normally over the phone, but whenever we’re together in real life, we’re, well, awkward?

I want to go back to that pre-2020s clarity of mind, that clarity we lost through the pandemic of teenagerhood. I find myself, seemingly against my own will, reaching for my phone and scrolling through the scattered gallery of my post-thirteen-year-old life. I took so few photos for so long because a part of me was convinced it was a waste of time. Looking back at this era is like looking at the memories of a different person.

Suddenly I am transported to a summer evening in 2018—a lemonade stand propped up in front of my home. Me, my brother, sister, and you.

It’s funny, the way we don’t see the people around us age as we progress through time. You simply believe that you had always looked like that, with your pink tank top and mildly annoyed smile. We looked so alike on that summer evening in 2018 when we were so convinced we could get people to pull over on the side of the road and buy a red Solo cup filled with lemonade that we didn’t even make ourselves that’s been sitting in the Texas heat for probably two hours at least.

We were so in love with making those flimsy little Rainbow Loom bracelets out of vibrantly colored little rubber bands, the ones we could take and twist into our own patterns and designs. They’d fall apart with the slightest nudge but we were so proud of them, handing them to family friends and neighbors “at no extra charge” with their lemonade because we were growing worried at how many extras we’d have to give away before the sun fully set. We were so convinced we could make strangers listen to us, care about us, stop for us and buy what we were selling. Convinced we could get people to listen.

Pouches of flavored Zyn stuffed into McDonalds french fry baskets. Shiny new cars that will probably be wrecked by the year’s end. Photos of a shadow lounging in an eerie red glow. Images carefully curated on an internet shelf that part of me wants to knock over and let shatter at our feet to prove just how fragile it all really is. Is this all we are now, “L”? Photos to be seen from far away as if we weren’t the closest of friends, did everything together, as if we don’t live like fifteen miles from each other.

I miss us, I miss ours, I miss our notebooks when they were filled with sloppy colors and drawings and pages we numbered because we assumed we’d eventually write up to that page but we never did and now it’s just notebooks with page numbers scribbled in the corner that are otherwise empty, that will always be empty.

Do you also feel like you numbered the pages of your life before you could write them, or am I truly alone?