“I've never been far enough from home to escape all the things that I can no longer take care of. The farthest place I've been from you is right by your side, across an entire circumference of a planet, pressing my palms against your palms, all the oceans right between us. The heart, a prison inmate, and a bluejay all walked into cell bars. There is no punchline. This is just another metaphor for having twenty-four ribs around the part of me that I want to set free the most. I dreamt once of sending myself in a bottle off to sea, corking the screw over my head and letting the water pull me closer to somewhere where my language is a foreign currency. When I woke up, there was rain spitting against my windowsill and the roof was caving in so close that it brushed up against my knees. ”
—“Escapism,” Shinji Moon
When people tell me they don't read, in my head, I'm always asking "How?!"
How can you not? How do you cope? How do you deal with all the shit life flings at you if you can’t hide away in a book?
Some will say “music,” and I used to say music, too, but there are times when a song can magnify all your bad feelings and make everything so much worse.
But never books. For a few hours, I can pick up a bundle of paper and just lose myself in a life that isn’t mine, a life that doesn’t have the trials and trivialities of my own (decidedly mundane, but at times, overwhelming) existence. Watching movies or television is entertaining, but it isn’t as all-consuming as drowning yourself in words and making them come to life in your head.
It’s an escape. I can check out of my life for a while and check into someone else’s. I can, through my imagination, be someone else and, if I’m lucky, actually have a clear resolution at the end. I can actually win.
Real life makes no such promises.
