I was working as an assistant at a nonprofit when I recognized the distinctive, almost maniacally perfect handwriting of my best friend. I can say that because it was something she had written when she was still my best friend, although we had not spoken in months.

It’s strange to know everything about a person. Everything without hyperbole, from the minutiae of the amount of blue that has worn away on her toothbrush bristles to her five year plan, her big picture goals, her past lives. It’s impossible to live two lives at once—knowing your own everything is difficult enough without the burden of another’s—but it’s also gratifying, in that your own problems seem so small when compared to the crushing despair of another person’s real life. As if it’s actually true that in the larger scheme of things, your life is not only cosmically insignificant, but much less trying than you had ever imagined would be the case when you were ten and your insurmountable problem was the fact that you had lost your milk ticket, which still had 9 punches left on it.

It was on the front and back of a self-published book of poetry and short stories. A collaborative chapbook intended to help people face their emotional problems without fear, it was as raw and guilt-inducing as the old woman on Shattuck’s face as she held out her hand for change. And I was supposed to spend the next hour publishing it on our website.

I read the first few poems, purportedly written by Anonymous. They were riddled with the lore of those past lives, the unique nightmares of an excessively gifted child whose parents were unable to help through no fault of their own, the clipped style that would have made the literary critic in me scoff if it hadn’t been so patently hers. They were awful. I closed the book and started reading the cover.

It was a selection from her meticulously kept journal. Our friend and I had visited her parents’ home during the summer, and the page held the details of our arrival at the train station, her opinion of the documentary we had seen, a brief mention of the fact that I had been in Europe only weeks before. I hadn’t seen my name in that handwriting in what seemed like a lifetime, but there it was, scattered casually across the book. It was so familiar. So at home on the page. I pictured her writing it in her childhood bed, humming along to the songs we had heard so many times. It was utterly innocuous.

Maybe that’s why she chose it. Anonymous, apart from my name. Personal, but revealing nothing. Style without content. It wasn’t about us, and I quietly thanked her for that.

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