What words do you wish you had spoken to someone before it was too late?
Now that’s a premise I can get behind.
Laura Imai Messina’s The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World asks readers to contemplate exactly that question as we follow Yui, a young woman whose life is shattered by loss. After the 2011 tsunami in Japan takes her mother and daughter, Yui learns about a mysterious phone booth in a small coastal town—an old rotary phone that’s not connected to anything. Yet people from all over come to speak into the silent receiver, sharing their words with loved ones who are gone. Hoping to find peace herself, Yui journeys there and slowly begins to open her heart again through the quiet act of “calling” those she’s lost—and connecting with others doing the same.
While the story is deeply immersive, I realized that my connection to it wasn’t driven by wanting to know whether Yui would ever pick up the phone and start speaking. What pulled me in was how it made me reflect on my own life—the conversations I never had, the calls I never made, the words that remained unsaid.
Because that’s what this story does—it turns the mirror back on you.
We all have our heartbreaks, our grief, our people who drifted away or left before we could say what we meant to. The relationships that never fully blossomed, and the ones we stayed in long after they’d wilted.
I thought specifically about a coworker who became one of my dearest friends nearly ten years ago. She was about fifteen years older than me—a transplanted Texan in the Northeast—and quickly became the older sister I didn’t know I needed. I loved her raw honesty, her warmth, her unwavering advice. Being with her felt like sitting in sunlight after too long in the shade. I was at her house so often that I eventually left a pair of slippers there—the universal sign you’ve crossed from “friend” into “family.”
We worked together for only two years, but she knew me better than some of my own relatives. When her father fell ill and she decided to move back home, I helped her pack and said goodbye, mourning her before she’d even driven away.
Not long after, I left that job under difficult circumstances. I was unhappy and stuck, and the more she tried to help, the smaller I felt. I didn’t want advice or solutions—I just needed to survive each day, and I was ashamed I wasn’t in a place to be proactive about changing my situation. So I stopped answering her calls. Her texts went unanswered. The last message she ever sent me was, “Zelda, call me.”
And I never did.
I closed the door on a friendship that had meant everything to me. I wasn’t strong enough to face her honesty or my own shame. So shame became my roommate, and we lived together for years.
When I came across The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World, I thought of her immediately. My situation is different from Yui’s—my friend is still alive. I could pick up the phone and call her. I could apologize. Tell her I wish I’d done things differently. That I think of her often. That I miss her. That her friendship carried me through one of the hardest chapters of my life.
Maybe she’d be angry. Maybe she wouldn’t answer. Or maybe she’d pick up, just happy to hear from a long-lost friend she thought was gone for good.
I suppose, like Yui, I’ll find out when the time is right.
For now, I look at my phone and want to be brave.
But I’m not ready yet.
Already thinking about a call you need to make? Read this first: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1419754319/?bestFormat=true&k=the%20phone%20booth%20at%20the%20edge%20of%20the%20world&ref_=nb_sb_ss_w_scx-ent-pd-bk-d_k0_1_15_de&crid=2Q8H9F4YQJ3GZ&sprefix=the%20phone%20booth
