In 2009, when I was 22, I decided to move to Europe. I would spend a semester in the Czech Republic on exchange and then afterwards, I would be in Europe. The plan was to smoothly disappear into it.

All the moving around we did growing up (two countries, eight schools, one province, four states and a territory) had, for the most part, kept my possessions to a minimum. Books, though, were somehow exempt. The typical move would see me adding three boxes of books and one box of everything else to the moving pile. As an adult, visits to either parent’s house (wherever they happened to be living at the time) always involved the slow siphoning of books to wherever I was living.