“It’s all there. Everything. Take a look.” -Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

                I’m visiting family in California, and there are six small boxes in my mom’s garage marked ‘Azlan OKC.’ In 2019 my mom helped me pack these boxes and send them from Oklahoma City to her house. That was just after I left the high school where I’d been teaching for years, and just before we drove up to Illinois together, my mom and I, storms in our rear view mirror, so I could start graduate school. This summer I open these boxes, sure whatever’s in there is something I can give away. I’ve been living without these for years. And I come face to face with books.
                There are moments in these books. The ones written by the authors, and the classroom moments of talking about these words with my students. The moments of my marks in the margins. The moments I shared with these characters—Anne Sexton in her poetry, Offred in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Amity Gaige’s Schroder, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince; so many others. The moments I sat with them, listened to them, imagined conversations with them while I walked through the woods. There are the moments of sitting with my mom in Oklahoma, deciding what will come with me to a co-op in Illinois with me, and those bring the moments just after, our road trip together, a hotel room in Urbana. A copy of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet isn’t here, as I gave mine to a graduating senior (who called me years later to say they’d just picked it back up). And here’s Richard Wilbur’s poems, which I brought with me from undergrad. Scattered through its pages are so many conversations with friends and so many more I’ve forgotten.
                All these moments, here and not here. I take a look. See the book, and feel for the spaces inside them and beyond them.