198 Sixth Avenue

One-night-eight.

You blink, and suddenly you’re figuring out where the books will live in your new home.

And even though you want to, you can’t bring the 10-foot-tall bookshelf with you — so you make do by giving away your copy of Looking for Alaska and Taoist Ways of Living, because a smaller room in the right city is always going to be the right choice in the long run.

You begin to find joy in the small stacks around your mirror, saving the bright orange, high-brow Classics for a spot on the bedside table. But because you’re you—and that needn’t change for any room of any size—your latest guilty pleasure sleeps between Murakami and poems of Leonard Cohen, in a simple and quiet happiness, waiting for the moment you get into bed.

One night you’ll close your eyes and remember the six-person share house you struggled to fall asleep in, and you’ll think about the stories that are created in a place like that, and how unlike you, they’ll always be there.

And you’ll be so glad you decided to spend nights exactly like this one; going to and from the kitchen, laughing against an ancient-old library, a treasure chest of truth and adventure, the beating heart of a home-away-from-home, the centrefold for a fictional family who will press their words into your pages, and make hard copies of things you could never replace.