Photo Credit: Flickr/GabrielaP93

She’s going to kill me for telling you this.

My best friend and I love to read together.

We’ve known each other since we were 13. Maybe 12. It’s been a very long time.

But we still love to read together.

In the first apartment I had on my own (a two-bedroom in Bed Stuy with a friend from high school) my best friend and I — both in our late teens — used to lie in my bed, on our backs, and read the same paperback. Not two copies of the same paperback, but the same book. Sometimes we’d wait to turn the pages until we were both ready, but most times if one got a bit ahead it was okay to keep going. This would require us to switch sides, but we made it work. Books I remember reading with her like that are The Firm by John Grisham and one of the Anne Rice vampire book. Maybe The Vampire Lestat.

In our 20s, while living in separate states, we’d read the same book at the same time (separate copies, of course) and make dates to meet online to talk about it. This was before fancy texting and Facebook. I’m talking old-school AOL Instant Messenger.

Read to chapter 3 and let’s meet back here in an hour.

Are you done yet? What’s taking you so long?

I just finished. OMG! What do you want to talk about first?

We would do this all day on a Saturday. All day. You can tell this was before married life and babies came along. What I wouldn’t give for an uninterrupted Saturday to read with my best friend now.

And now, in our late 30s (Shut up. Late 30s are the new early 20s. Or something.), we still do it. But now we have Kindles, kids, husbands, jobs, and side projects. So, our reading dates look like this:

We now need two days to commit to one chapter.

Almost 40 and I am so excited to be reading a book with my best friend again.