I found your annotations in a 1987 copy of The Great Gatsby. You underlined "So we beat on, boats against the current" and wrote in the margin: "but what if we stop rowing?"

I have been thinking about your question for three weeks. I think Fitzgerald would say stopping is not an option — the current carries us regardless. But your question implies a choice that Fitzgerald never gave his characters. I find that more hopeful than the novel itself.

I hope you found whatever you were looking for when you wrote that. I hope you stopped rowing, if only for a while.

You are currently reading The Catcher in the Rye and thinking Holden Caulfield is the most profound character ever written. I'm not here to disillusion you — he is exactly what you need right now. Every book arrives at the right moment.

In a few years, you will discover Borges and your idea of what a story can be will shatter beautifully. You will fail to finish Ulysses three times. You will write terrible poetry and some of it will, eventually, become less terrible.

The loneliness you feel in the school library? It becomes a home. Keep reading.

Thank you for the Sappho translations you left on my desk. I've been carrying Fragment 31 around in my jacket pocket for a week. You were right — Anne Carson's translation is the definitive one. "Greener than grass I am" has more honesty in five words than most contemporary poets manage in five collections.

I owe you a coffee for this. Or perhaps a first edition, if I ever find one.

If you have found this page, you are either lost or looking. Both are acceptable reasons to be here. This archive is my attempt to preserve the small moments that textbooks ignore — the conversations after class, the poems written on napkins, the feeling of walking through empty corridors at night.

Nothing here is important. Everything here is true. Make of that what you will.