The book you never finished

You meant to finish it. You still mean to.

But the reading that used to carry you off somewhere now competes with a hundred smaller, louder things.

There was a time when you disappeared into books. You read past your bedtime, missed your stop, looked up from the page surprised to find yourself still in your own living room.

Reading was not self-improvement then. It was not a way to be productive or informed or the kind of woman who has read the right things.

It was pleasure, pure and greedy. A private world you climbed into and did not want to leave.

Then life got busy in the way it does, and reading became one more thing you should do instead of something you got to do. The stack by the bed turned into a quiet accusation rather than an invitation.

And somewhere in there, you lost the particular joy of being lost in a story. The absorption, the way a good book makes an evening vanish.

That pleasure has not gone anywhere. Give it twenty uninterrupted minutes and it returns, the way it always did.

The way back asks almost nothing of you. Tonight, or whenever the house goes quiet, pick up something you actually want to read.

Not the book you think you should finish. Not the one that improves you.

The one you would read purely to find out what happens next. Read ten pages with your phone in another room, and let yourself remember what it feels like to be carried off.

Things worth remembering you love about being lost in a book:

To the girl who read under the covers long after lights-out: that hunger was never a phase to outgrow. It was one of the truest things about you. It has been waiting patiently for you to come back for it.

See you tomorrow.