When I was a teenager, the number one book I was most obsessed with was 'Gone with the Wind.'

No. I can’t change. I shouldn’t change.

I wanted to go home to the safety of my bed and to my stuffed animals and to my people I’d known my whole life. I had nothing to say to anybody, and fervently prayed that no one there would have anything to say to me.

All the librarians turned their heads to me in a collective shush. “I’m afraid you have to survive library school, put up with the general public on a daily basis, and endure several years of budget cuts in order to deserve these drinks,” Chris told me kindly. “But someday, Dash, all this will be yours! We know how to spot ’em, and you’re a young, temporarily one-eyed librarian in the rough!

But whether or not you are here, you are here – because these words are for you, and they wouldn’t exist if you weren’t here in some way. This notebook is a strange instrument – the player doesn’t know the music until it’s being played.

The drapery was so thick and the furniture so cloaked that I half expected to find Sherlock Holmes thumb-wrestling with Jane Austen in the corner. It wasn’t as dusty or smoky as one expects a parlor to be, but all the wood had the weight of card catalogs and the fabric seemed soaked in wine. Knee-high sculptures perched in corners and by the fireplace, while jacketless books crowded on shelves, peering down like old professors too tired to speak to one another.

There’s no way for me to know she’ll find me here. I didn’t call. I didn’t text. I left it up to old connection, that old friendship sense.

But somehow, knowing the Moleskine was tucked away in my bag, containing our thoughts and clues, our imprints to each other, somehow that made me feel safe, like I could have this adventure and not get lost and not call my brother to save me.

Lily was mittens and hot chocolate and snow angels that lifted from the ground and danced in the air. She said she loved winter, and I wondered if there was any season she didn’t love. I worked hard to accept her enthusiasm as genuine. My mental furnace was built for immolation, not warmth. I didn’t understand how she could be so happy. But such was the love I had fallen into that I decided not to question it, and to live within it.

He can sometimes act a bit loner-ish, but I think that’s not because he’s some serial killer waiting to happen; he’s just his own best company sometimes. And he’s comfortable with that. I guess there’s nothing wrong with that.