Reading Among Books

‘reading among books - my body weight melts off my contour and slops into the squeaking hardwood floor beneath - a nest i crawl into, a space where i sprawl my limbs and forget my body exists beyond my brain's letterbox.

anything is possible here. an infinite puzzle of as and ds and ys. i grab and glue and build, but the letters are slippery. be gentle and they will stick. careful now - make them touch softly and they will turn into a harmonizing poke. a chord of somnolent notes settles into the floorboard cracks and slinks into my ears.

the mail has arrived. i hand it back to the shelves, back to the house. i am cranial gloop in literal downtown. digesting can be so meditative, even the floorboards beneath me forget to creak.’

model: leonie buchegger

I was always a book nerd. Getting lost in books was something I took pride in. By the time I was six, I had read my first book over five hundred pages - The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

Followed by weeks of hibernating in the Harry Potter universe, at seven I got second place in a reading contest. I read on a stage in front of three hundred people. Some dormant remnant of anxiety must have made itself at home between my liver and stomach because I can recall how nervous I was to this day. Language always came easily to me, German and English classes weren't enough, no, I also had to take Italian, Spanish and Latin (extraordinarily useful) on top of that. And to spice things up, I started learning Korean in my early twenties.

Growing up in a shattered family, surrounded by abuse and lack of stability, depression slowly built itself a nest and ate up my spell of flight. My love for reading gradually started to rot away, bit by bit, alongside myself. After overcoming my troubled past, I tried picking up books time and time again, but the letters would never truly stick. Reading felt dull, not peaceful.

It wasn't until I met Joshua D.-T. in South Korea and he read to me on the Seoul metro as I dozed off on his shoulder, that the cordial notes of reading found a hidden pathway into my letterbox.

I have read twenty books since then, more than I have in the last six years combined. Weird, how people can re-open doors to dormant pieces of yourself.

So I started the new year with a book: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig.