My Unhealthy Relationship with Books Has Become My Escape.

“The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.” — James Baldwin

I asked God what he thought about me
He whispered back, “you are a rarity.”
One that blossoms after the rain
An evanescent ebb and flow of highs and lows
the equivalence of pain and joy.
A tumultuous loop of on-going chaos

He asked me, “what goes on inside that mind of yours?”
I didn’t want to startle him,
So I smiled and said nothing.
Because replacing reality with fictional characters suits me.

Stories of other lands saturate my thoughts.
Slowly filling with more words than I have emotion to express.
I lust after the inept and broken-hearted that roam these fictional worlds.
Their stories fill the most profound void.

My values and experiences revolve around a world that is not my own.
Though I now live freely within these walls.
I’ve found a utopia in the words of writers, old and new.
Their words are my cocoon.
And their emotion is my evolution.
Their selective wordplay cradles me before the world awakes.

The words of Baldwin, Hurston, and Morrison remind me of my humanity.
I admire their effort to not disguise oppression as beauty.
Singing the lullabies for the poor and disenfranchised.
I envy their connection to their stories.
Full of grit and experience.

I so desperately yearn for new beginnings.
One’s full of depth, joy, and solitude
Though I may never find those things in the present nor the future
I am content.
I may never feel the warmth of the rising sun.
Or reach the world of Hogwarts.

But at the end of this life, I will look into the abyss and know
that literature is what kept me afloat.

Words are my escape.