This is really good! An ode to one of those intense digital friendships from childhood.

So Ben P— slid into my Couchsurfing DMs in September of 2019 and said he was a friend of yours and wasn’t sure if I’d heard the news. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t. I hadn’t heard anything from you in two years, after you sent me fifty pages of your novel and asked me for honest feedback, and I said are you sure and you said yes, rip it to shreds, the last thing a writer needs is bromides and I took a red pen to it and scanned it at my internship and told you what I really thought and never heard from you again.

On a sidenote the literary partnership between Lillian Wang Selonick and Cairo Smith has been so fruitful! Just feels like there’s real sympathy there, and it’s so compelling to see a project where it seems like two people are both equally invested.