Words of the Day

"Do you think being an avid reader is easy? It's not. It's not at all. 

You usually have crush on your schoolmates, right? Well, we fall for fictional characters. Oh things we'll do for them to come alive! If (s)he doesn't know your existence, that hurts but well, you can still see him from afar, right? We can't. We can only see them in words, imagine what they look like. Desperately longing, helplessly being in love. 

And the things we do to our favorite authors. We stalk, we write love letters, we curse their genius brains in secret. It's exhausting! And we count days, weeks, months; we root for the day they publish their latest works, or even announce that they are writing a new one. 

And the expectation! We can't stand but putting our hopes in the sky. We want their works to be good all the time. If they don't, we cry.

Getting a tweet/e-mail/any sign of appreciation from our favorite authors feels like we've just won a lottery. It's just too precious. I would feel like putting "_____ tweeted me" in my achievement column (In fact, I almost did). And we constantly wonder what our favorite authors will be doing by now. Are they eating what I'm eating? Are they even human? 

We also have no control of our inner demons; the other being in ourselves who feeds on new books. Our tendency to hoard. Do you think we don't feel sad of the piles of unread books in our shelves? We weep for them. But we can't help it. We're numb without books. It's not healthy for our wallets. Nor is it for our body. But if we see books and we can't buy or read it, we're like suffocated. You might as well tie us up in chairs and put us in a dark, creepy room and duct-tape our mouths. The feeling isn't unlikely. It's mutual. 

But you should know why we love books that much. 

A book is a house. It offers us blankets, warm clothes, milk, biscuits. It's our friend, our teacher, our enemy, our guardian, our pet. Books are loyal. If you get tired of them, they understand. Maybe you want to go on an adventure, try new things, then may think. Your friends may change, you may change, but books don't. The characters on your favorite books won't. You dump them for a while, they're always waiting. When you miss them, they welcome you open-handed. And it's sad. Knowing you can grow up, study hard, earn money, get married, have kids. They don't, unless their creators want them to."

-@ndarow