The Dump

Readers' Anonymous

My name is Sara, and I'm addicted to literature.
Welcome, Sara.

It all started when I was five years old, a lonely little girl on the playground.
I couldn't run with the others, so I might as well have something to distract me.
No harm, right?
But the red dog and the princess and the mouse, they drew me into the labyrinth.

I grew to love fiction of all kinds.
For years, my best friends were ink and paper.
I made other friends who loved that bewitching new book smell as much as I did.
We fueled our addiction by trading not just books, but stories of our own.

That was a powerful draw for me, a habit I haven't kicked since.
I can't navigate my own town because I can't focus on the scenes going by.
My mind slips into a blur of fabricated worlds, mine and others.
I should've been learning the roads, but my nose was in a book instead.

I can't make friends because I can't focus on mundane topics long enough.
My mind is always full of clamoring shades, begging to be spoke aloud or written down.
The ghosts of men and women long dead.
Whispering poetry or ideology or 'what if?' in my ear.

Sometimes I want to take a match to it all.

"Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page, from the second and so on, chain-smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the secondhand notions and time-worn philosophies."

There, you see?
I can't even talk about it without some quote or other coming to mind.
It is too deep within me, too ingrained in me.
I cannot stop, cannot let go.

Fictional places, even the ghastly ones, seem more-than-real.
Keeping my focus off of them and on this particular planet Earth is exhausting.
But what good have they ever done me?
Where are Hermione and Faber and Halt when I need them?

My name is Sara, and beings who have never lived will be my ruin.