My public library branch was supposed to close three years ago. It didn't, because forty-seven people showed up to a city budget meeting on a Tuesday night in January, and I was the youngest of them by about thirty years.

I had been going to that library since I was four. Not for any particular reason — my family didn't have books at home, my neighborhood didn't have a bookstore, and the library was three blocks away and free. By the time I was twelve, I had a specific chair I thought of as mine, a librarian named Ms. Okonkwo who knew which shelves I had already finished, and a reading life that existed almost entirely within those walls.

When I found out about the proposed closure, I felt something I didn't have a name for yet — a kind of preemptive grief, the loss of something that hadn't happened yet but felt already real. I went to the meeting because I didn't know what else to do.

I spoke for two minutes. I said that the library was the only place in my neighborhood where something was given freely without expectation of return, and that this was rarer and more important than the budget line suggested. I said I had learned to read the world in that building, and that closing it would not save money — it would transfer the cost to somewhere less visible.

The branch stayed open. I don't take credit for that — forty-six other people spoke that night, some of them far more eloquently than I did. But I learned something about civic life: that showing up is not nothing, that rooms where decisions are made are open to people who walk through the door, and that the library had been teaching me this all along.

At Harvard, I want to study public policy with a focus on cultural infrastructure. Libraries, museums, public parks — the spaces that exist outside the logic of the market. I want to build the argument for them in the language of economics, because that is the language that currently gets heard.