Whenever this comes up with people online, someone always asks why Tulsa, like it’s a stopover on the way somewhere better, and I get it, I did too before I actually lived here. What changed my mind wasn’t the skyline or the river, it’s a used bookstore about fifteen minutes from my apartment that’s been losing money on its own admission for years and just keeps not closing, run by a guy who will talk your ear off about a first edition if you let him and stop the second you signal you’re just browsing.

I found my copy of Gormenghast there, actually, a beat up Overlook Press paperback with somebody else’s pencil underlining already in it from decades ago, mostly in the descriptive passages, which felt like a strange kind of company while I read it. I’ve never been able to bring myself to erase those marks. They’re not mine, but they’re not exactly not mine either at this point, three readings in.

The thing about Tulsa that I think gets lost is that it’s a genuinely easy city to build a small, specific life in, which sounds like faint praise until you’ve lived somewhere that fights you for every routine. My drive to work is fourteen minutes. The bookstore, a decent coffee place, and the house where Thursday game night usually happens form a triangle I can cover without much planning, and there’s something in that ease that actually protects the hobby side of my life rather than shrinking it. I’m not spending two hours a day getting places. I’m spending that time reading, or at a table with Priya arguing about whether a card does what she thinks it does.

I won’t pretend it’s without its gaps. The board game scene here is small enough that everyone at Thursday night has met everyone else’s partner at some point, which is nice until it isn’t, and there’s exactly one shop that reliably stocks anything heavier than a gateway euro, so I mail-order more than I’d like to. But the trade off, a slower pace, a bookstore that knows my taste better than most algorithms do, a fourteen minute commute, is one I’d make again without much hesitation.

People move here for the oil money history or leave assuming there’s nothing else to the story. There’s a guy with a shop full of underlined paperbacks who’d disagree, and so would I.