My parents created a slot canyon lined with blankets in the backseat where, tented by picture books, I camped for the nine-hour drive. Dick, Jane, Sally couldn't leave school grounds, but Sam I Am, Little Bear, and Miss Suzy the squirrel -- the entirety of my personal library -- accompanied me.

Previously, the few times my family had driven upstate, we left New York City after rush hour. Sunset burned outside the windshield. Above the illuminated highway stripes, black undulating humps rose lightless, lifeless.

"Mountains," my father said.

Monsters I heard and cowered.

This trip, we'd rise with the sun, drive all day, and get to Niagara Falls by dinnertime. None of us knew it back then, but we would move cross-state a total of five times in my first six years of school: west, east, south, north, center. Me the new kid, again and again and again.

By the second move I grasped that classmates couldn't be counted on. I formed reliable relationships with books, idolizing heroines who worked their way out of scrapes. The orphan who seeded her imagination across the fields and forests of Prince Edward Island. The freckled girl whose composition notebooks filled with peer reviews made her an outcast. The bored little sister whose route to adventure has since become an internet cliche.

If I moved between September and June, I'd look for my storyfriends during library period. In summer, my father would walk me to the town library where I'd sign my name to my own card.

The reunion always began with Anne. I'd search the stacks, M for Montgomery, hoping not just for Green Gables and Avonlea but all six Anne books. Then F for Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy, maybe even The Long Secret and Sport. The last a classic, C for Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

By the third move I earned adult borrowing privileges. That summer I took The Andromeda Strain on vacation.

"Who's carrying who?" an adult called out, seeing the thick pages propped against my bony knees. "The kid or the book?"

My father joined Book-of-the-Month Club and passed along The Martian Chronicles. I liked S is for Space, but Dandelion Wine shook the welcome mat of small town life. Clinton, NY felt too close to Green Town, Illinois.

Childhood warned me: Don't look back.

I stay present physically but risk time travel through literature, rereading the same 1983 Bantam paperback every two years.

Little, Big by John Crowley is set in a folly house -- a home with multiple facades of varying architectural styles -- where generations of Drinkwaters and Barnables truck with fairies and discover "the further in you go, the bigger it gets." Formerly a rootless child, protagonist Smoky Barnable marries into a house that's both prison and portal.

Similarly, in the slot canyon covid has scoured, I've returned to blankets and books. Hunkered down I'm liberated, joyous inside my head, my imagination the only home I've never, ever left.

Reading Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? in The Atlantic, 25 years after its publication in 2007 was enough to make me drop out of journalism school and join a graduate program devoted to its evil twin, Public Relations. I doubt that was its intent, but America changed a lot in those 25 years.

I graduated college with a degree in medieval Spanish poetry from a college in Central NY. America's universities are designed to make the punch of what college costs and what your return on investment will be be land a few years after graduation. After a few years of struggling in the workforce, I realized I was going nowhere. Maybe more degrees would help?

This time, I was smart. I took a job at NYU as whatever the polite term for secretary is and it came with free tuition. It was the heyday of Gawker and online journalism was still exciting and ascendant. The authors were no longer just dull WASPs who interviewed Pat Buchanan. They had voices and jokes and some even had regional accents like mine.

The parents of NYU students would barge in, demanding to see the Dean of the school where their child was attending when they got arrested for buying drugs in Washington Square Park, and my job was to be a polite, well-educated body to slow them down. I was bad at my job but by virtue of nothing earned. I was simply hired because a rich parent might see me and think: uh-oh, maybe I know his parents (they did not know my very mentally ill parents). There wasn't much to do, and in-between doing classwork and doing "work" for the University, I set out to read great journalism pieces of the past.

What I learned from reading the Great Works: If you try to re-sell a diamond, the jewel that culture says is the symbol of opulence and love and a proxy for devotion, you'll realize: it has no value. It's an inflated market because of concerted efforts by people in Public Relations to fund movies where diamonds were central to the story, to convince reporters to feature “size the diamond” in the story of every royal getting married, to news reporters to never cover what goes on in an actual mine. The Atlantic article showed the triumph of the concerted efforts of cynicism over the weakened body of reality.

What I decided, as I used my precious, limited credits under the spectre of an inevitable housing crash and newspapers folding across the country: We’re on our own, and would you rather be the person who wrote the article that was remembered 25 years later but had no industry, or an unnamed person in an article who didn’t have to take a job getting yelled at by rich parents? I switched schools and careers, and took the more cynical route. I regret it every day, but I regret it with the aid of health insurance.

I’m a coder, and I like video games. One writer person did change my life, though. Some guy named George Eliot?

I couldn’t get a date, so I decided to do something about it. I found an app called “The George Eliot Conversational Etiquette Game: Correcting Your Ability to Converse with Little Reminders,” designed by “STEMinEnglish.” I downloaded it onto my AR glasses.

Later, my bud Tommy was talking about different Spidermans, and he kept saying “dude” this and “dude” that. I was like “why do you have to say ‘dude’ all the time?”

Then suddenly a black and white photo of a woman with droopy eyes, a bulbous nose, and hair like a travel neck pillow wrapped over the top of her head appeared in my field of vision through the internet glasses. As she spoke, her pupils moved and the mouth dropped like a ventriloquist doll.

No, no, my dear! One mustn’t be Mr. Aristocrat, assessing another’s speech in lieu of listening to what they say. Are you sure you’re not just distressed? -10 points

She kept popping up.

When the trainer explained to a group of us coders how workouts are more mental than physical and I mentioned listening to ABBA while on the treadmill, the lady popped up (Mr. All-About-Me, -17). At the Afternoon Ideation meeting, when I corrected a slight inaccuracy in someone’s comment about HTML, she popped up (Mr. Nitpicker, -14).

There was no reason to these rules. My etiquette score was -87, a rank in the “lesser arthropod” category.

Then I got a notification for an expansion pack, designed by “MeatCleaverXXX”: Improve your training with Pavlovian negative reinforcement. This app would like to access the heat coils in your thermoregulated clothes. Do you give permission?

I did.

Tommy said something dumb again, and she popped up (Not-so-honorable Mr. Judge, -30). This time, I detected the seams in the coding where the expansion pack picked up.

The woman’s eyes glowed red.

Time to burn, hombre!

Ten milliamperes of alternating current jolted my torso. I shrieked and jerked forward.

“Whoa, you ok?” Tommy said.

Apologize! The hologram said, nostrils flared.

“Yes! I’m sorry for being rude!” I gasped. The shock stopped.

It hurt, but I kept trying. She kept popping up. A lace collar never induced so much terror. But I NEVER quit a video game.

Just when I was concerned my speech would be permanently slurred, I got a call about an Extended Warranty for my car. The dude talking to me sounded stale. I couldn’t hang up or I’d be shocked. I just kept saying “Ok. It’s ok. I understand.” My back started to sweat, which would make the shock worse.

“Wow, I never got through this whole script,” he said. Then he started crying. He said he hated this. I said it’s ok. I understood. Then I started getting good scores. We talked three hours. He--Daryl--apologized. I forgave Daryl (+500). Daryl said I saved his life (+10,00).

As a reader of short stories, I expect to find meaning hidden under the surface and to find that meaning swiftly. I am swept in by these stories, pulled through a tale I know will not carry on as long as I might beg it to do so. To read short stories is to walk the fine line between the thirst for more and the knowledge that I have only to wait a few pages before I am struck with a sense of significance.

I spent the better part of my adolescence searching for the kind of meaning that only a short story can offer. An equal mix of escapism and a desire for some understanding of the heart of my raging hormones kept me hunting. Life should be rife with symbols; the nature of our struggles should be made clear if we pried doggedly enough. My pimples had to serve a greater purpose.

Raymond Carver slid into my first college writing course quietly. His second life brought with it his preternatural ability to move with a hushed and devastating force on the page. “A Small, Good Thing” struck me, at first, as the type of story I should emulate, if only because the middle-aged male writer is the standard-bearer of most first writing courses. I expected a dull and harsh tale; meaning, as it so often is, would be hammered through in the last few pages. I would lap the meat of the story up and find another lesson to sink my teeth into.

The first tears came unbidden as I read, and when they came, they did not stop. What was worse for me, sitting in one of the dark cubicles on the sixth floor of the library, was that I did not want them to. I could feel a longing for the warmth not only of the baker’s sweet cinnamon rolls but for real contact. I had spent so long pulling emotions out of my reading and writing, believing language should be separate. Yet, here on the page was a single act of human grace, told through the simple act of pulling out a chair and offering coffee and dark, rich bread. I was devastated and enraptured.

My heart ached upon finishing, and I grabbed up my things. I had been dodging my mother’s calls for a week. When I called her back, she asked what was wrong. I assured her I was fine, though my head felt warm and cotton-y in a way that was unfamiliar.

“Everything is okay. I just don’t think I’ve told you I miss you.”

When she responded, her voice held in it the twange of a Tennessee accent. I realized how much I had craved hearing it since moving to New York. It was a small, good thing. For the first time, the thing itself was enough.