The snow outside glistened beautiful and harsh. "You don't go anywhere without an overcoat and boots," was the first thing they said to me when I got here. "You can freeze in your car. You can die in a snowstorm. No one will know to look for you." Funny how ingrained it is, this knowing that getting anywhere is the most dangerous part. This fear of your own unaided presence.

On the second Tuesday in May, I stood among the quiet brown shelves spilling with words, opinions, stories and tried to make out what it meant to live in a climate that was perpetually trying to kill you. I continued shelving the fiction books with names ranging M to P, smoothing my finger down the spines of each one and pausing occasionally to investigate when a cover looked inviting. Opening one, my hand found a slight parting between two pages. There was an envelope folded and wedged between chapter three and four, the corners bent and yellowed. Inside was a postcard of New York.

"It's a big city." A feminine hand had scrawled, "But at least, I know I'm here, and that gets to mean something."

Deep within the library, a man's voice broke open the silence, ripping open my thoughts like rebel fire. It died away and I remembered to continue shelving. I was almost finished now, and next I would go back into the sorting room and peel stickers off of magazines. This peeling and sorting happened every day that the library ran. Tomorrow, other hands would push this cart and shelve more books, other authors, different letters. It was an endless job. It was a job for well-oiled cogs or friendly robots because you served the public, and the public is bad at gratitude.

He emerged from the other side of the shelf and turned towards me, boots clumping on the muffled floors. Hands moving, he mumbled harshly as he approached me. "Hey." I continued shelving where we were, in the N section and hidden from the sight of the rest of the building. "Hey, girl!" The stranger yelled, air pregnant with fear. I turned. Most of the fingertips of his gloves had worn off, sparse material covering other sparse material. His wiry beard fell to his chest, riddled with grey and white, and his eyes yellowed at the corners. Stale coffee was on his breath.

The heater whirred and he breathed with mouth wide open, leaning closer. "The badlands, are in here." He pointed repeatedly, deliberately to his chest. "You hear me? The badlands. They live in here." The heater whirred, he stabbed his chest one more time before muttered away out of the door, into the snow. He didn't look around. He didn't wait for anyone.

Later that night, I walked home and paid attention to the way the sun set like a kamikaze fighter, swallowing all it could within its dying grasp. Gold devoured the windowsills, the rusty apartment ladders, the two fur-wrapped lovers holding hands down the sidewalk. Somebody asked me if I wanted to attend a party of endless happy strangers and for the first time, I said no. The phone beeped off. Pieces of the home stood like skyscrapers across my temporary room and I ignored them all. I listened to silence like a friend. I made a cup of tea and put on pajamas. I reached for my pen and my journal.

And the North Dakota mountains pushed up against my doors.