Reading Again 

The pipeline to a very well read child, to a young adult who seldom reads, even when required- is the most disappointing.

I was that child, eyes sore from scanning wrinkled pages and absorbing every word with every spare second I could squeeze. I would Ignore my science lecture as I read science fiction and would read ahead in my literature textbooks. I would think and speak in a constant run on sentence, filled with a niche vocabulary acquired from reading levels above what was the median. I would become the paper and interpret every word like a sword or a cushion, I would feel the water enter my lungs and see black and white turn to color. I would laugh and cry and be violently ripped around at the author's whims. I would then write my own stories and craft and kill off my own beloved character, to feel what the author felt- to see if my own characters would hold as much emotional weight as the books of my childhood. I would write for hours on projects that should have taken twenty minutes, elaborating and delving into a headspace I am constantly trying to see through, to wipe the condensation out of my eyes and see the world how it is, not how I perceive it. 

I sometimes feel I've lived through the books, like I took every fig and gluttonously ate them and let them coarse through my veins, only to fuel my picking of another. This is only through the imaginatory gaze of the defining literature of my childhood. 

One day the reading stopped. I picked up a book and never finished it. I couldn't. It was too slow to start, too boring, my eyes hurt too much, and my phone has many more outlets for entertainment. I didn't realize then but that integral page, when I gave up on a new book, when I didn't bother to dog ear or stick a 0.99 cent bookmark- squashed a big part of me. It sounds dramatic but it's true. It's been 4 years since I've read and been completely immersed. It's like looking back on the blissfilled days of your childhood when playing pretend felt real, but somehow can never be recreated. I have been trying, but igniting a flame in a damp and barren environment is hard. Resuscitating the part of myself that lived to read has been hard. The ibooks and ebooks and audiobooks haven't helped. When a passion dies, was it meant to be or was it forced? Did nature run its course and cause my vigor to go extinct, or did I poison it myself. Recently I've decided that life hasn't been the same. I have the compulsion to revisit the times in which I had an actual escape, an addiction that encapsulated greatness and aspiration, a time when I didn't have the heaviness and the tainted perception that I do now. When I could live many lives rather than see through the lens of only mine. This is partially fueled by the longing for familiarity and the unimaginable and mystifying portals I would dive through. Now I am in college, and have decided that as an English major and a self proclaimed emotionally evolved person, I am a fraud and a liar for not reading. 

So I drove to the nearest Barnes and Noble replica chain, and Bought 2 classics. Dracula, and the Bell Jar. I am saving dracula for September and October, but I have read almost half of the bell jar in a few hours, with no breaks. I have laughed and related to Esther in ways that reawakened the parts of me I left behind. I am getting a taste of what It felt like to be invigorated and excited with literature, to feel the crisp pages between my fingers and be feral to turn the page. 

Oh, how it feels great to be reading again!