Baldwin falls between Aubin and Ballard. I would exist at eye-level, and what a stroke of luck that is.

Don’t get me wrong. It’ll be as much (if not more) of an honor to be on the shelves of some kitsch indie bookstore. But I grew up going to these big box bookstores with my grandmother. I got to know the flame, the flag, the penguin. I got coffee with her after we made our selection for the cafe test drive.

I’d order a white chocolate late, small. She’d get water and dunk her own, superior teabag in after, let it sit while we both fell into silence.

My grandmother read tipped slightly back and to the side against the divider, a nearly bemused kind of focus on her face, and she’d make sounds sometimes. “Oh!” and “Oooh.” They were not directed at me. I’d read hunched, the tip of the book’s spine just under the table, reminiscent of how I read in class.

Today when I visit it feels different. Expensive, expansive, nearly painful in its consumerist bite. Yet the queer kids with the grandmas flock still to the SFF section. I see them after, hunched over their reads in the cafe, chocolate chip cookie half-untouched before them, deep in the kind of other world I write.

I want to be there, too.