Another Guest Post!

Hey, folks, have I got a treat for you!

Cyberdaughter the Youngest has written another guest post.  Not a story like the last time, but a short piece on her love of books and how it affects her.  It is a wonderful little snippet, but well worth the time to read - more than once!

Books

Sometimes when I am reading just the right passage in a book, I feel as though I can reach out and touch the words. I can peel them off of the page like a sticker and adhere them on to the world around me and see, for a time, their meaning in everything that touches me. The words blend seamlessly in to my perceptions and for just a little while I am changed. Everything around me is suddenly awash with sensation, beauty, meaning... 

I feel more alive at these moments. I feel full and heavy and secret. I feel special and alone. For a few minutes, days, or even weeks, I am looking out at everything in a new and wonderful way. I move slower, I see more clearly the things that I often take for granted. Even the simple act of making myself a cup of coffee is full of moments that I never noticed before. I am more open to the people around me - the ones that I know and love and also the strangers that pass by normally unnoticed. It's as though they are wearing their stories like a cape or a blanket and in order to look them in the eye I have to read them all. Thoughts and meanings and words and strands of time weave around them and I almost feel as though I can run my fingers through them the same way I would run my fingers through my own hair; soft, silky, and intensely personal. Familiar. They are stories that I already know but had forgotten, the memory of them teasing at me as I take them in. They linger. A car drives past and the driver's stories reach out to me and settle gently around me as though the car drove through a patch of dust and left me covered in it, breathing in the cloud. It's a peaceful feeling, like having a silken sheet drift down to cover my naked body over and over again; it's always there, but I hardly notice it unless it moves. 

It fades after a while. The passage lingers until I once again forget in the face of every day motion. The sticker of words fades and peels, the edges are rough and the letters are barely legible after a while, but it never entirely leaves me. Some small piece, a tiny bit of paper, a letter, a feeling - it stays with me and becomes a part of my world. I cherish these pieces; they are my foundation. Hundreds upon thousands of these minuscule moments are embedded in my thoughts and perceptions. If I concentrate, I can pull one up and unfold it and cradle it and cherish it and be awash with the meaning of it for a while, but most often they are an accident. A moment, a thought, a bit of sun that looks just like it did that afternoon so many years ago. A shout in the distance, the splash of water, a scent, or a flavor of the past will catapult my senses back to those tiny, faded letters and for just a little while I am caught in its web once more. It is like my mind is pulling at the threads that make up my self and showing me for just a moment that I have not forgotten, that it is still there, that it is a part of who I am and always will be. That feeling is like the sun on a lazy afternoon. I bask in it, I close my eyes and smile to the sky until the clouds eclipse the rays of warmth and I return to my normal, whole self again, made up of all the faded words and feelings and stories so deeply woven with each other that they are scarcely separate letters anymore.

 Sometimes, being a parent is so worth it!