The Reader’s mind is filled with nonsense and wonders others cannot comprehend. It is a world of its own, separate from the imagery of reality. In it, the Reader creates a dimension where she lives, both eternally and ephemerally.
*
The Reader ages and identifies differently. She shares the soul of a black girl living in the 1930s; the anguish of the romance between two philosophical boys; the heroic aspirations of a group of demigods; the prudence and faithful suffering of a 19th-century family; the hunger for God of a Hindi-speaking sea survivor; and the cynicism of a Henry Wotton.
But does that come along with wisdom? Although unfortunate, the Reader soon finds the wisdom she knows applies not to the world of people, in which she feels like a toddler crawling from one point to another. Not knowing; not understanding.
*
The Reader used to be the sole ruler and subject in her kingdom, where she granted and was granted limitless freedom, but under the invasion of a reality against which she is powerless, the pain she feels for breathing in the wrong air is almost oppressive. Her opaque world becomes more defined with definitions that are both clarifying and confining; intensifying.
Among those definitions, there is a love she once acknowledged and now tries to ignore. To no avail, of course, as the cracks in her world leave the Reader open to the watchful eyes of the object of her affection, who lets her not forget, but reacknowledge.
*
He causes her sorrow, her beau, as he lives in pictures and scenes and has a stronger grip and firmer footing on reality than she ever would. He refuses to let the Reader fly and refuses to let her root; refuses to leave the Reader be and refuses to care. Still, the Reader loves like there is no tomorrow for that is all the language of love she knows.
Their love is lost in translation, or so she would love to believe, but it takes no time for the Reader to realize that the love she keeps is too much for still and moving pictures, too intense for a person outside her sphere, too overwhelming for her beau.
*
Upon knowing this, she writes for the first time a cry for help lest she dies in his world.
Insights 