Eating books.

When I was young, reading was never just reading. It was consuming, devouring, absorbing the words on a page, and letting those stories become a part of me.

I can recall a time in my life when my own memories were blurred with the stories of my favorite characters. Not sure where their lives ended and my life began, reading to me was as necessary as breathing.

I have a memory of myself at maybe 10 years old. It is snowing outside, and the house is quiet. My mother is making dinner, my baby brother is sleeping, and my father is still working. I have the living room to myself, and there I am: curled tight into the corner of our tired blue recliner, arms around my bony knees, my book propped onto the arm rest. The book was Matilda by Roald Dahl. A couple hundred pages were gone in just a few short hours.

Never had I read a book like that—so fast that the last page came with teary eyes because I could never read it for the first time again.

Though I find less time these days to finish a book in one evening, reading still provides the same catharsis that it always has for me. I visit countries I will never see. I fall in love. I fight small battles and big wars, and I almost always win.

With a book in my hand, I am that little girl again.

And at the close of nearly every book, I find myself believing, if only just for a moment, that the world makes sense again like it did when I was small.