She breezed into my life leaving trails of obscure literary references, both metaphorically and in little slips of torn paper scattered over every surface. A hasty scrawl of a name or sentence on a tattered scrap of paper would turn up in the most unlikely places. A poem by Wislava Szymoborszka fell out of a recipe for french onion soup, along with a photocopy of a page on chocolate cake from Cooks Illustrated, and a fragment of a sentence, I'm never sure whether it was abridged when it was hastily copied onto the page, or when it was torn from the rest of the page and stuck on the bathroom mirror with a sticker from a piece of fruit. Knowing who she is mostly involves telling the way we first met. Some people are easier to describe that way. We met each other during long nights chatting, she avoiding the most unpleasant interactions with her family and me with no particular schedule, able to work any hour I was awake, and we connected like perhaps too many girls in love, sharing stories of abusive ex-boyfriends, me only listening since the worst thing that had happened in any of my relationships was the particularly unkind timing of the last break-up. While she'd been hiding from her boyfriend and his family, I'd been dumped by both women I was seeing on the same day, and then followed that up shortly after by being lost, broke, sopping wet in the rain, in a city where the only person I knew by name was one of the aforementioned ex-girlfriends. It didn't compare, though I think we both got the sense that maybe the worst days of our lives were firmly in the past, and while neither of us were particularly optimistic, it was at least a bit hopeful. She'd sworn off men, and that was good enough for me. Perhaps it was a sign when we first met -- met in person, though we'd talked for most of the year before -- we spent a month travelling together. I had two changes of clothes and a beat-up laptop computer, and she arrived with a suitcase full of books. She'd forgone even so much as a change of clothes to fit another couple favorites into her bag. It might have been premonition that she wouldn't actually return home for years after that, and she couldn't bear to part with a favorite, whether read or yet unread. She made extra room by wearing most of the spare clothes she'd intended to pack, a layered soup of broomstick skirts and cardigans that if she pretended would do double-duty in some way. Maybe I only remember that particular suitcase full of books because that arrival was ill-timed, just after the last bus from the airport left, leaving only taxis all too willing to charge exhorbitant fees for the short-seeming trip into downtown. It didn't seem quite so short, lugging a suitcase without wheels full of books as far as the inner city bus route, past the big-box stores, now closed, being past 8pm. We gave in and called the taxi, though since they didn't have to come to the airport itself, they waived the extra fees and charged only the arm, sparing the leg we so badly needed. That suitcase travelled the next 1200 miles with us, up and down the west coast and following us to a crash-landing in Colorado, though a couple of the heavier books made disappearances into postal receptacles and the occasional bookshelf left unguarded. It wasn't a bad trip, though it did leave a lot of opportunities for misfortune, which we'd dodged with the luck of two people young and flexible enough to follow a night spent on the floor of the video game room in the Boise bus station with three days of couch-surfing in Oregon. We discovered that month that the cleanliness and friendliness of the drivers of a Greyhound bus could be exactly anticipated by how far east that particular route travelled. Santa Barbara, down the coast? Always clean. Headed into Boise? There'd be something sticky on the floor, but it wasn't too bad. The bus that ended all the way in Chicago, though, made us glad to get off in Colorado. It smelled horrendous, and the driver was keeping a tight rein on everything. Hours spent snuggling in the seats we'd been so lucky to always get together gave way to last-minute seats with surly seat-mates, unwilling to yield enough to give us seats together. Greyhound spit us out in Colorado, and we arrived in the next chapters of our lives with thirty-one books, sixty-nine cents, a bag of almonds, thirty-six printed greyhound tickets (and three hand-written by bus drivers in the dead of night) and three changes of clothes between us.