Unpopular Opinion: Books are better than people

You know, one time I was in the airport with my parents, waiting for an good time for me to go to my gate. I study in Canada, you see, but my hometown is in Latin America, so far away from here. I had been talking to my parents when they noticed someone that they knew, a set of parents doing the same thing they were doing to me with their son, and they decided to say hello. Upon recognising the son I was immediately struck with anxiety and I did not move to say hello.

The son brought me some bad memories of when I was younger. I only met him once when our parents, who were relatives of the same person, had decided to spend the day together. Once had been more than enough. He had dedicated the whole day to teasing me about my weight, about my face, about the fact that I didn't have any friends at school. He knew someone in my school that had told him that I was a barajada. A loser.

So my parents, who have deeply-rooted Latin American pride and manners, turned to look at me with anger in their faces. We went back and forth, they ignored my boundaries, and we went to say hello. I was reverted to a meek, overweight little girl with no friends as I shied away after a kiss hello, and after a few minutes of small talk my parents walked me to the gate. Telling me how much of a malcriada I was.

It was then that my mother told me that I had to stop running away from people. That it reminded her of whenever people would tease me at school and I would shut everything down and hide behind my beloved books. To this day, when my books are more contemporary poetry than young adult fiction, these words ring true.

Two weeks ago I got a call saying that I had not been hired for a job that I had been praying to get in for. Immediately after, I decided to ignore all of my responsibilities and read the entirety of the Vampire Diaries series in under a week. During Christmas break, my parents hounded me to see my transcripts and I, trying to anxiously avoid them, decided to read "Aphrodite made me do it" by Trista Mateer and "To have coffee with a ghost" by Amanda Lovelace in one day. I threw myself into the Percy Jackson series after a break up that threatened my will to live. Whenever I feel sad or bored, I have a copy of "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" ready in my kindle app.

Books are better than people because they don't let you down, they're steady, they're there for you until they're over and even then you get to reach into those pages again and pore over them again and again. The only thing that can calm my anxieties, truly, is a good book between my fingers, and while reading the pdf versions of them has always been fun (and cheap, God knows that my parents won't pay for my rent and my two part time jobs won't pay for my books) there is nothing comparable to having the actual thing in my hands.