Yesterday I woke up with the strangest and extremely powerful urge: to read a print book.

Yes, that’s right.  I woke up with an urge to pick up a book.

So I did.

I walked to our huge Ikea shelf, the one that looks like 24 tiny boxes smooshed together to form one big grid.  And I picked up the first book my hands fell on.  I didn’t read the whole thing, just a few paragraphs and I felt an odd sensation of calm, peace, serenity.  As my eyes moved over paper, not a screen, I felt alone in the best way.  Like I was in my own world but my world was me sitting outside with a voice from the sky telling me story.  I was momentarily lost.

Then Isaiah woke up and started asking for love.  So I went to love him.

But that feeling, that urge to pick up a book, was something I can’t really explain and can’t really trace.  I suppose it depends on what feelings we associate with different acts, and when our subconscious is craving that emotion, we have an itch.  Apparently, I was craving the feeling of quiet and aloneness I associate with reading.  I live on another planet when I read.  I am so deeply entrenched in every morsel of the book that I sometimes think I’m not all living in the present world when I’m in a book of fiction.  And even after I am finished with the book, it’s like an actual voyage to another planet, to outer space; it takes me a long time to return home.  For my mind to blink and see people again and not characters.  For my head to clear itself from the haze of narration and smell the fresh air of human existence, not the page.  I get lost.  In the best way.

Where are you when you read?