Tomasz Jedrowski

“I adored this book more than you knew,” it read there in your stocky, right-leaning script. “I wanted to keep it . . . but it’s yours. Bring it back one day if you can. I’ll be here. J.”

gray-blue eyes the same color as the Baltic Sea in winter.

This is how I lived back then—through books. I locked myself into their stories, dreamt of their characters at night, pretended to be them. They were my armor against the hard edges of reality. I carried them with me wherever I went, like a talisman in my pocket, thinking of them as almost more real than the people around me, who spoke and lived in denial, destined, I thought, to never do anything worth recounting.