One More Chapter

Once upon many times, I was told to go to my room.  Shocker.  This particular time my mother, #lakme, had tossed a Nancy Drew book at me and I wasn’t allowed to come out until I finished it.  I was horrified.  I was 7.  Oh, if I could only say reading was the biggest horror I’ve survived.  Little did I know what life had in store for me.  Between being denied from my dream college and being the Fazoli’s breadstick girl, I had no clue.  Alas, I read the damn thing and as much as I tried to resist, I found myself crushing on a fictional teenaged detective.  And so it began, my love affair with books.

I’m a true blue nerd.  I’m one of the last girls in America keeping Barnes and Noble in business.  You know how you go into Target looking for a toothbrush and $200 later you’ve got 3 bags of I don’t even know what? – that’s me in a bookstore.  Browsing ends hundreds of dollars later.  I’m addicted to the feel of books, the turning of the pages and knowing exactly how much I have left to read.  I understand you adore your kindle, there’s no judgement, but I need the real thing.  It’s exactly the way I feel about online dating.  No thanks but get you some!  I refuse to let books fall through the cracks into history with phone trees and taxis.  Sidenote, if you’re still using taxis, just know I’m going to assume your life involves a lot of murder.  I have a passion for binding and old paper smell so e-books just don’t do it for me.  Not my type I suppose.  In my eyes, they seem less authentic, less personal and extremely lacking of character.  I’m a sucker for character and you should be too- looks fade ladies and gentleman.

You ever walk into a room and just fell in love with the way it made you feel?  Welcome to me in a room full of books.  Who needs a man when you have shelves upon shelves of amazing at your fingertips?  I mean, if that just didn’t just seal my fate as the future cat lady, I don’t know what will.  Libraries send my heart into a frenzied spiral.  I get lost in the pages, the words, the tales.  I can’t help it. I love all of it. The YA, the suspense, the mystery, the romance, the bio, the true crime, the endless adventure.  There is something magical about being swept into a story that takes you out of the one you’re living.  Call it the great escape.  You can live vicariously through the characters in a world that doesn’t truly exist but in a small locket of your mind.  It’s beautiful like that.

Books become personal.  Unlike a movie, the visuals are your own.  I love finishing a book on a plane, knowing I’ve just finished an adventure that no one else around me knows about.  It’s mine.  You keep Instagram scrolling, I’m in the middle of a war against evil.  Maybe that’s what makes a book so great is its ability to make you feel like you’ve been given a rear window opportunity to catch a glimpse of a story…you alone.  Books have a way of reaching around you and pulling you into a dance even when you don’t know the steps.  A way of luring you into the unknown and letting you in on a secret.  I don’t believe any two people have ever read the same book.

If I have earned any right to dispense advice in this life, it would be to surround yourself with love. Always. Your hobbies, your people, your home, your clothes…all of it. I will forever be surrounded by books and stories and imagination because I believe in chasing dreams.  I will forever be telling myself ‘one more chapter’ and literally falling asleep in the pages.  I would like to thank my mom for making me read my first book and I would also like to thank myself for doing whatever butthole thing I did to get grounded that day.  I can’t imagine a world without books.  I would be devastated.  I have an imagination that, like dragons, cannot be tamed.  And, furthermore, what’s the point of anything if dragons don’t exist?