𝐃 𝐗 𝐌 𝐈 𝐍 𝐈 𝐐

I wouldn’t call myself an avid reader—not these days. I haven’t fully digested a book since January. I had every intention of keeping the momentum, of staying immersed in pages and prose. But as I’ve gotten older, my focus has shifted. These days, my mind is split between studying for the LSAT, keeping the house in order, and all the other quiet, necessary distractions that adulthood insists upon. The kind of reading I used to do—the kind that swallowed whole afternoons and left me feeling slightly altered—has become harder to access. My attention frays more easily now. I read in fragments, with longing.

Still, books seem to have a way of finding me, even when I’m not looking. Maybe especially when I’m not looking. They show up in the most unexpected places, like odd little omens.

The first one I remember was Poetry, the magazine published by the Poetry Foundation. I found it over a decade ago, open and wind-tossed, its spine pressed against the side of a Wells Fargo in downtown Oakland. It was damp with fog and city grime, its pages fluttering like it was trying to get my attention. I picked it up and stood there reading poems under the gray morning light, surrounded by traffic and pigeons.

A few years later, I was walking to MacArthur BART when I saw a copy of Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur lying on the sidewalk. It looked untouched, freshly purchased. I told myself I wasn’t going to read it. I wasn’t going to be that person—I wasn’t going to pay for something I’d once dismissed as Instagram poetry wrapped in soft grief. But there it was. Just like Fifty Shades of Grey, which I once mocked and later read in secret, just to see what all the noise was about. And, to be fair, I paid full price for every Twilight book without a shred of shame—my incorrigible love for vampires demanded it. Those books taught me something, too. They weren’t just a guilty pleasure; they were useful, in a way, like training wheels for writing romance with clean lines and high-stakes longing. Pasteurized, yes. But effective.

Then, just last week, another small miracle: six novels from The Southern Vampire Mysteries—the series that inspired True Blood—resting on a grassy mound near an abandoned lot. My husband and I were out for a walk, talking about nothing in particular, when I spotted them. A little worn, but dry and intact. I knelt down and gathered them like fruit, their covers warm from the sun. I would have paid for those books without hesitation. But fate, ever generous, simply gave them to me.

The thing about books is this: sometimes they don’t wait for you to come to them. Sometimes, they find you where you are, no matter how distracted, tired, or closed off you’ve become. And when they do, they remind you who you were, and who you still might be.