I’m living in my family’s condo. We’ve owned it for 10 years, so we’ve been vacationing in North Carolina for a very long time. One of the times that we were vacationing here, I would go over and again to the community center that’s here. There was a pool, a workout room, and a library. Not a huge one, but a decently sized room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves with every genre you can think of. It was completely unsupervised. There’s no one to check out the books, no sign-out sheet.

I was a teenager left uninhibited in a library, and that’s a dangerous place for me to be. There was one shelf that had these hardback, leather-bound, gold-painted edges, Harvard Classic Edition books, and it was like a kid in a candy store for me. I took multiple trips, effectively stealing them from the library, because they were too pretty for me to just leave there. I felt really guilty about it. It was eating away at me for a very long time.

When I had gotten to a point where I said I’ll take them back, wanting to clear my conscience, I was informed that a fire had started at the community center, and it completely burned to the ground. They don’t think that it was foul play; they think it was just some kind of electrical mishap, but that library is gone. All those books were destroyed. To this day, I still have all of them, and I no longer feel guilt for taking them. I honestly regret not taking more. There were some I left. Not many, but I left a couple. I just wish I could go back in time and take all of the books to save them.