Smiling in Book Stores While Wanting to Cry

Salutations!

For the past week or so, since the launch of this blog, I have been reading delicately. You know what I mean when I say that if you're a reader of busy procrastination. You love reading, you love books, you love reading those books, but it's difficult to manage reading them while you have a school-consuming, over-thought life to live. Sometimes, I can submerge myself in books, fangirling, crying, weeping for humanity because it can never be as good as the fiction minds can produce. But recently, I haven't gotten that close. I haven't been able to grasp onto those precious words, and therefore I cannot finish ANYTHING. It's rather uncomfortable, being a devoted reader, but only being able to focus for such a narrow time. I am in the middle of three novels right now, but life seems like it moves too fast in that slow-motion car-accident kind of way. 

But here's the tricky thing about surface reading: I want more of it. I want to read multiple books at the same time, even if I can only devour twenty pages a week. I think that if I pile things on top of all the other stacks of papers and hardcovers and manuscripts and journal entries and newspaper articles and celebrity gossip magazines, I will have a reason to sit down and concentrate. I understand the value of all the literature, but I can only sit down and relax once I have fastened the right to be involved in such gracious pieces of work. You know what I mean? 

Why do I immediately jump to an article about how slick the stairs were at the Oscar's when Jennifer Lawrence fell (laugh at ALL the gifs!) when instead, I could change my life again and again by reading the books of authors who have given their souls to the papers of a publisher? 

Don't get me wrong, books are books, stories are stories, ideas are ideas, but sometimes, it's so hard to commit myself to the physique and profundity of a well-written novel. Sometimes, it just doesn't make sense to lose myself in somebody else's world. Sometimes it feels like I don't deserve it. 

Don't worry, though, because as our favorite authors have told us, nothing fictional can ever stay. None of these falsely reassuring feelings I have can remain in me for too long. Not all the OTPs can be shipped to the end of the earth, and not all of the sadness can be removed by a single dandelion in the spring. But the fiction helps.

Yesterday, I went to my favorite book store EVER. Books A Million. BAM. I bought three more books, a new journal, and read a few of those gossip magazines in the back of the store because I'm cheap and can't buy everything. Anyway, I felt so good. Just good. Good, okay, alright, in love with the feeling of being good. Sure, some of those magazines were filled with bad hatred and badly written articles, and some of the books I saw probably had some bad plot twists, but they all had such beautiful covers. Falsely advertised beauty. Falsely advertised wealth. Falsely advertised lessons. All of those things I had been feeling before I entered this store were still here, but this time, they made me feel good.

Surface reading the book jackets, empathically wishing Taylor Swift's "haters" would go back to the depths of fire from which they came, and plastically smiling at the store clerks felt good. I don't know if it's because the millions of books overpowered the single feeling I had, or if they all felt the same way. 

Whatever the case, I think books need us to feel as sad as they do sometimes, even if you can't take a chance to read them. Maybe the defunct departure of a book is as rewarding as the lively suspension it can give you on a good day. 

And maybe it'll take more visits to the library, since I spent all my money in the store, or maybe it'll just take a disciplined day of reading glasses and tear stains, but I have a feeling more of those good days are coming our way. 

DFTBA

-Kami-