Living to Read

Once I cracked the code of reading and discovered the magic of stories woven into text, I fell in love with reading. I proudly became a bookworm. Every year I attended middle school I received either the Biggest Bookworm or Most Likely to Become a Famous Author recognition in the yearbook. I walked through the halls, nose buried, head deep within imaginary worlds, somehow not running into anything or anybody. Words were my truest friend. Not a day went by where I didn’t spend hours lost in character arcs and world building. I read through my classes, cleverly hiding books in my binder to ignore the droning voice from the front of the room explaining trinomials and square roots. As I grew older, I continued to love reading. But of course, life got busier, and I had less time to lounge around, curled up with the smell of old pages, and the feel of hot peppermint tea. No longer could I get away with walking and reading at the same time or hiding a book under my desk during lectures. When college started, and I didn’t open a book other than as required for class for a full semester. It was during that first semester that I made one of the worst choices of my life.

I woke up in a strange place, beeping filled the air, pounding out the rhythm of my heart, which was beating manically in no particular pattern. Of course, I couldn’t hear it; I was rendered deaf by the symphony of ringing bells in my ears that wouldn't go away. Irene, the nurse with me that night leaned over my bed,

“are...feeling...?” I couldn’t make sense of the words through the high-pitched droning.

“What?” I asked, in a tone too loud for the quiet hospital corridor outside my room’s open door.

“How are you feeling, dear?” Irene repeated, still too soft-spoken for me to fully understand. I mumbled a wordless reply in hopes she would take it to mean whatever answer she wanted. I was sick of asking people to repeat themselves, every time I did, I wanted more and more to disappear. Wanting to disappear is what had gotten me here to begin with. Why had I wanted to die so badly to go through with it? Was I really so selfish? So cruel? My mother sat on a vomit green couch to the side. She was still in her work clothes, a pair of wrinkled grey pants and a striped blouse. The clock across my bed read that it was nearly two in the morning; why hadn't she changed yet? Her eyes were full to the brim with tears, but not one leaked out. She was strong. Stronger than me. I couldn’t even try to stay alive. If I had any strength left in my body, I would have crawled over to her lap and begged for forgiveness. As it was, I was tied to machines and so weak I could barely lift my head to eject the poison I had all too willingly ingested.

That night; the night I chose to kill myself was completely ordinary. The sky outside my window was black as ink, and the stars glittered as they always have, and always will. I didn’t know it would be the last time I saw the sky for nearly two weeks. I was home alone; home alone with my hate; home alone with my emptiness, my apathy. I felt nothing. Music blared from my phone as I sat, curled in a ball in the spot I had curled many times before to lose myself to a novel. No novel lay spread in my hands, no saga whispered my name or begged me to open its pages. I was a black hole, a void of nothingness. I sang along to the music as I suddenly stood, having made no conscious decision to do so, and walked down the hallway, trailing my fingers along the smooth wall. This is the last time I will ever touch this wall, I thought, and laughed aloud. The closet squeaked as I opened it. My hands shook as I pulled out four bottles of pills as I had done so many times before. Unlike before, I didn’t put them back. I kept singing along to My Chemical Romance and Taylor Swift as I downed handful after handful of pills.

“If you stop now, you’ll have just done it for attention.” I told my reflection after the first bottle. How I hated her, that girl in the mirror who just looked back with unseeing eyes. I hated her so much I wished she was dead. I hated myself so much I wished I was dead.

The choice to commit suicide resulted in the worst thirteen days of my life, trapped in a teen psychiatric ward where we couldn’t even see out the windows. The kids were loud and obnoxious, and impossible to escape in the tiny area that became my entire world. Two rooms, a hallway, a gym, and the cafeteria marked the only places I went for those tortuous days. I was not allowed to go outside; COVID took away the option to see my family, and I never got a break from the constant barrage of teenage drama and noise.

“Why can’t you all fucking shut up?” I screamed at my extroverted roommate, who had just secured us fifteen more minutes of quiet time by hollering at her friends down the hall. The whole place was too loud and too much for me. Kids screamed at each other and begged the staff to play their music so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think. Even alone in my room, the music drifted down the hall, like it was propelled on a wind that existed just to spite me. The other kids had fun in this hell, they joked and laughed with each other; hollering banter that could have been just as effectively communicated in a quieter tone. They slid down the hallway on socked feet and had competitions to see who could get in the most trouble. There was nowhere to go to get a break.

My main activities for the never-ending days included staring at the walls, watching the other kids from a corner of the common room, taking freezing naps under my regulation two blankets, and walking out of my room to see the singular white clock above the nurse’s station had only ticked by a few minutes. I would have been more entertained if they gave me a paint splotch to watch dry.

In the common room, there was a TV we could watch behind a bulletproof glass case, and a cabinet labeled “library.” Given my introverted nature and general hatred of the entire situation, it took me a few days to work up the courage to ask a staff member to open it for me. The staff smiled warmly, and without any of the biting sarcasm I had expected replied, “Sure, of course. There’s not much in there though.” She took the key from her pocket and inserted it into the hole which clicked open with a satisfying snap. She was right, it was a pathetic selection, maybe fourteen books total, half of which being the middle of some old, obscure fantasy series. One book did stand out among them. Its black cover was striking and comforting. This was a book I had read before and had loved every moment of: The Book Thief.

From that moment on, every moment I spent in the ward was with a book in my hand. I followed the journey of Leisel from the perspective of Death and connected in a way I never had before. I lay on my bed, feeling, for the time in almost a year, happiness, like a blue ball of electricity in my chest, crackling down my fingers and into the pages before me. It was an odd sensation, one I vaguely remembered but hadn’t experienced in so long. It grew from the pit of my stomach and extended up, stretching through my body like a river of warmth.

Until this point, I still saw no reason to live. Not one of the therapy sessions I was forced into had helped me find a reason to continue living; but this book, those words, ink on yellowed paper, did. I devoured the books in the library; finding new favorites from books I would never have picked up before. Taking inspiration from Leisel herself, one of those books traveled home with me when I left. It was Little Bee, a book that, I, in my oh-so infinite wisdom, decided shouldn’t be in a psych ward anyways, considering the topics it discussed. In the book the main character struggled with her guilt over her inability to prevent someone’s suicide. It was profound, and beautifully written, and I just couldn’t leave it to lay in the cabinet for months until the next kid like me asked for it to be opened.

I didn’t just steal a book, I promise. I also convinced my mother to bring a bag of my old books in. This helped to bring the library up to date a bit, and more than doubled its size. Maybe someday another kid will ask to open up that forgotten bookshelf and take out a book that will give them a reason to live as I did. Probably not, but it's my deepest hope that the books I brought will help someone else, in the way that those books helped me. Perhaps another bookworm will be enticed by one of my favorite titles and re-discover a lost love of reading. Those stories reminded me of what it felt like to be happy. Those books saved my life.