Audio Books: A spiritual experience

I do still hear echoes from the past, a senior in secondary school marvelling at the latest thing I was working on, with a smile on his face. Moments after, he was grimacing in disappointment at my inability to start one thing and finish it. My credibility as a doer - out of this world - yet, I am an athlete who will run a 100m race and stop at the 50m point, quitting just because I was in the lead way too easily.

The Mystery of Solomon

To the credit of my praisers, they have always been right about my capacity to visualize what is said to my hearing. The most fascinating thing about said ability is that once I have visualized I completely misplace my ability to forget. Speaking of fascinations, have you ever wondered how a search engine (guess which one) straight-up presents you an ad of what you have been pondering over all day? Well, I recall a day when I stared intently at my bookshelf, totally lost in its loneliness. Over 30 books neatly arranged, some stacked, others planted parallel, trailing one another.

I was a hunter-gatherer (a phrase I thought Comedian Dave Chappelle coined until it occurred to me that I did not do so well in history class to use the phrase), a hunter-gatherer of books. I was a complete mystery to me. In fact, the only comparable mystery I can muster off of my brain is how Solomon in the bible sexually satisfied all his wives and concubines without having a sore penis, or the opposite of blue balls, maybe green, yeah green balls. While I visualized King Solomon's balls, it pained me to know that I will eventually not read all of these books, and I kid you not, fast-forward two years - I packed all the books all 30 unread of them in a box I got from McDonald's and made a well-appreciated donation to a friend who was a fellow bibliophile.

I Need an Exorcist

I have always thought of reading books as living another person's life, coasting a whole other timeline, one where you live the life of the protagonist, one where you become the protagonist. It is, what's the word, orgasmic when an author writes the main character as the narrator and the observer - the eyes, ears, and mouth, the skin, and the tongue. Complete. Whole.

... I held a rosary in my left hand as I prayed for the spirits of Google to leave me be ...

Can google read your mind? I will answer that question with another question "Is this a conspiracy?" In fact, I'll do you one better, "Am I a conspiracy theorist ?" There it was, one of the ads at the top of a search result totally unrelated to the subject matter - "Audible, Start your free trial today, get a free book" - an opportunity to cement my status as Sir Hunter, the Gatherer.

I Fell in Love

The name "Audible" does speak volumes (pun intended). It spoke volumes to me. I signed up and I sought desperately for fiction on a platform with an endless amount of books, my world had gotten a lot bigger. I searched for fiction, memoirs, and autobiographies, genres that would let me inhabit the lives of the characters, like a virus, like malicious software.

Omnigenderous

I came across a beautiful work of art, a creation of Kristin Hannah titled "The Great Alone". Male heterosexual as I am, I was coerced by inhabitation to live the life of a young girl who by forces she could not control had to move to Alaska and suffer a damning fate. I saw my father get killed, shot by my mother in this novel, I had sex with a handsome boy, I wore a nice skirt, I went through labor and bore a beautiful boy. I was omnigenderous, a word I created to explain the plight of a god.

What helps me dwell in a world that by every definition of reality is not mine is a skilled narrator whose voice latched onto my sensitive senses and makes it their own. Julia Whelan, a woman with a voice of 7 angels singing in harmony made me hers as she fed me the words with a spoon, almost as though I was been inducted into a cult of sentences. A genius in her own right. I now live on as a mother in another timeline while I pursue other ventures in other realities.

In a world where reality feels claustrophobic, an audiobook is the perfect shrine for meditation. Listening to these narrators has been an immersive spiritual experience. I have read a total of 13 books; I have lived a total of 13 lives.