A World Of My Own

I love books. I always have. Since I was a little girl, books were an essential part of life. I read them, wrote them, had imprints of their covers on my face from falling asleep with them. I constantly had bruises all over from running into things because my nose was stuck in the pages of a good book. Neighbors laughed as I walked to school because, chances were, I was about to run into a) the light pole or b) a parked car. True story.

In my Human Development class last semester my professor told us that parents should be worried if their children got to be older and still got lost in their own imaginations too often. He was talking about when children choose to play with imaginary friends rather than real ones, but it got me thinking.

I never stopped getting lost in my imagination.

That's not to say that I'm a loner or that I'm underdeveloped. But it is a fact that, growing up, many of my heroes and greatest influences were characters that came from books I loved (as a twelve-year-old I was in such distress because I didn't want to name my daughter Elizabeth, but I didn't know how else to name her after Jane Austen's best-known heroine). My love for books has not diminished over the years. Contrarily, it has flourished.

There are many more things to be said about why I love books, but the one that I've been thinking about most today is how books provide me a place to escape to. When life gets to be too dramatic, if somebody says something that really gets under my skin, or I'm feeling particularly lonely or whatever, I can escape into a book where my problems no longer exist (consequently, this is also why I have a passion for writing, but that's beside the point). It's no longer about the bad grade or the roommate argument. Now it's about finding the beast before the rose dies, catching the snitch when you can't see through the rain, or saving the husband of the woman you love from Madame Guillotine.

It's about creating a world entirely your own, where you can get lost in another person's problem without actually having to solve it, or finding magic when it seems to have taken a temporary sabbatical from your life. Getting lost in a good book is getting lost in relief - a world all of my own.