"Why do You Read?"

You ask me why I read.

You pluck the book out of my hands and away from my roving eyes, letting it flip to a random page, losing my place. You peer at the text, glance at the summary, grimace, and once again ask me why I read. You let out a disdainful snort and let the book tip out of your hand onto my desk, crumpling the pages beneath it. And as you turn back around in your seat to converse with your friends about girls and football, I pick up my second hand Mass Market Paperback, and I thumb through in search of my page, careful not to go beyond it lest my eyes glimpse the future. I return to my reading.

You asked me why I read? Let me tell you a story.

Christmas 2010. I was nine years old when my soul was snatched from me.

“You’ll really enjoy this,” my mom insisted, pressing a pristine book into my hands.

“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” I read aloud.

I stretched out on the basement floor while my parents cleaned, and I opened to chapter one.

The Boy Who Lived.

One week later, I marched into school with this new adventure tucked under my arm. My eyes were glazed over, blind to the mundane world around me. My mind was lost, dazzled by green and red sparks. My thoughts were wrapped in musty parchment. My tongue swore it knew the taste of pumpkin pasties and chocolate frogs, even though they had never graced my plate. Snitches and broomsticks appeared in the margins of my homework.

I was gone. Worlds away.

But the kids around me were all back on earth.

Several eyed the cover— the reds, purples, and golds— and announced that their moms would never allow them to read books about witchcraft.

While on the other hand, my mom sewed me a bookmark. Layers of orange, purple, and green fabrics folded over each other into a braid-like pattern. I proudly fitted it into my books. And it has faithfully kept my place for me ever since.

Late summer 2011. I was ten.

My brother gave me nine books, and I turned them into sixteen. An old man’s face, kind and smiling, beamed up at me from the back page.

“Redwall,” I pronounced, fingers brushing over a mouse on the cover.

In my bouncing backpack, the books were jostled. Their fibers loosened. Their binding lost its stiffness. The crisp covers bent and folded. The pages were stained beneath my thumb. And I breathed them.

It was also around this time that my pen began to move.

2017. Sixteen.

The year I read twenty-five books.

The stories unfolded before me like rose petals, with multiple layers and musks. Dew drops and shining covers. I journeyed through Adarlan to reclaim my lost throne. I survived the winter in a snowed-in hotel. I solved a mystery aboard the Orient Express right after I fought alongside vampires and warlocks in Brooklyn. I was a traveler that year, hopping from place to place, never sleeping in the same town twice. I raced through, marking off titles left and right, heart pounding, eyes wild.

My pen flourished, my own story forming like clay beneath my fingers.

2020. Nineteen.

I owned a seat in the finest theater in the world— my back deck. From there, I watched the spring unfurl thin green beech leaves, and coax the grass from the winter scarred ground. From that seat, I watched actors play before me on the pages of my books, their hands twisting in my shirt collar and pulling me down down down— into other times. Other worlds.

I walked the streets of New Orleans, not in the shoes of a vampire this time, but rather in those of a witch. Phantom wisteria crept up the columns of the deck as I slipped away into rich, coffee-black night. Sometimes I’d look up and swear I caught a glimpse of a ranger’s cloak whispering around the corner out of sight. Surely it was I, not Will, who stalked silently through the forest, an arrow knocked in my bow as my eyes shifted in the hazy twilight shadows. Surely I was the one who rode through the Solitary Plains, never resting, never allowing myself to blink lest the monster we were hunting began hunting us.

Ghosts danced before me, and I danced with them.

Summer faded into fall, but October had not yet stolen the leaves from my beloved beech trees. I came home one week, starved for a story, and plucked one off my shelf.

“All the Light We Cannot See,” I whispered to no one.

A week long rain storm swept over the Carolinas. Perfect. I cracked open my window, seated myself before it, and opened to the first chapter.

Throughout that week, the fresh scent of forest rain swept into my bedroom, but for me it was the smell of the English Channel, wafting into my bedroom in Saint Malo, France. I felt along the sidewalk with my cane, blind to the world but seeing everything. I twisted the knobs on the radio until the static crackled, and I whispered into the microphone, my fingers fluttering against the Braille words of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

My father did not return from the German camps.

But when I tore my eyes from the page and reality bled back in around me, my real father was always waiting right there.

You ask me why I read.

And the truth is… I don’t know. I don’t know why I put myself in these situations. I don’t know why I did what I did.

I don’t know what I was thinking when I became a ranger’s apprentice. Or followed a half-giant into an alley of wizards and witches. What was I thinking? Traveling into the Congo on a steamship like that? Was I insane? Was I mad? When I willingly walked through the moors to that decrepit man Heathcliff’s house? Or when I volunteered as a tribute? I’m telling you, one day I’m going to get myself killed.

So maybe I should just stop reading.

It’s safer that way.

Don’t worry, don’t worry. You won’t find any more books in my hand. I won’t be fighting any more dragons or swiping priceless paintings of birds from art museums.

I’ll be good. I’ll stay in line.

But if I ever get hungry again, and my mind begs me to let it off its leash, I may just accidentally wander too close to my bookshelf. And when I do, there’s no stopping those ghostly hands from reaching out from the spines, grasping me by the wrist, and yanking me into oblivion once more.