Losing Myself

Losing Myself
Christopher Turner



     It keeps calling to me. My thoughts perpetually turning to it. I lose sleep just thinking. I can’t keep my mind off of it. All I can do is think of what is to come. Eternally dwelling on the next event.
     Every time I pick up the book I lose myself in the text. I forget where I am. I forget when and who I am. I often forget that I am even reading. I fall out of reality, with its dull gray and miserable existence. I fall onto the smooth white wilderness and see the flat forest of black letters. There I watch the colors rise around me forming into a world apart as the reality of my surroundings fades away.
     As I read I cease to see the words. They begin to form a microcosm with a range of infinite hues painted from a palate of merely black and white. They form into a world where eternal happiness is not only a possibility but generally immanent. They become an existence where problems are rarely unresolved. Reality is upheld only in the sense that there are still problems to be resolved. The issues there are larger than life dwarfing the little problems in a reality I left behind.
     I cease to be me. I become the disembodied observer. From which view I not only watch the story unfold but experience it for myself. The characters, one of which I have become, are not only words on a page but actual beings. They are spirits made up of verbs and nouns coming from the mind of their author, consisting of all the components of life, a pulse a soul and a mind of their own. They are as real to the writer, and to me, as people everyday seen.
     Books are not only there as a tool of convenience. They are not simply entertainment to end boredom. They are not something to be left on the side table till there is nothing else to do. Books are an escape from the world around us. They are supposed to be an escape to a place where things are either better or worse than here. Where the problems are not our own.