I took this photo at 4:25 in the morning. I’d just finished Six of Crows, and I wanted a photo of the book. I wanted a photo to look back on and help me remember how I felt as I finished the last page. To keep the book with me at all times, even if just as a photo on my phone.
It was 4:25 a.m., and I was supposed to close the book and move on with my life and go to bed, but I didn’t want to do any of those things. I kept flipping through the pages, looking for specific passages in the dozens I’d marked.
I hadn’t felt that way after reading a book in a long, long time. I call it reading with my heart, when I am in the book, when I physically respond to the story. When I can’t read fast enough, when I hold my breath during dangerous scenes, when my heart flutters when characters hold hands for the first time, when I giggle alone in the early hours of the morning from a witty line. Because I’m not alone when I’m reading; the characters keep me company. That’s what has always drawn me to reading—the connection, the humanity. Reading others’ stories and writing my own.
But when I got sick(er), it took so much brainpower to read that there was no place for my heart. I have felt twinges of my old self recently—the reader I used to be, the writer I used to be. It’s overwhelming. It’s confusing. I learned to reinvent myself, to separate myself from the two aspects of my identity I’d held so close for so long. And I’m so glad I did, because it helped ensure that my favorite identity will always be as a daughter of Christ, but now I wonder if maybe those old labels can come back to me. If those old feelings, those old words, can return home, can return to my heart. Typing those words is terrifying, because I know this might not last, that some things are simply lost and gone forever. But my heart can’t help but whisper that not all is lost, that maybe I can find my way back to reading with my heart and maybe, just maybe, to writing fiction with it, too.
But no matter what happens, I read this book with my heart, and that is enough, because I didn’t know if I could still read like that. But I did, and I’ll be honest and admit that I’m a bit teary-eyed over it. I have some books that I tell people I hold pieces of in my heart. They’re the books that I carry with me at all times, the ones that tell part of my story. And this book is now one of them. I’m honored to welcome it home. To maybe welcome other parts of myself back home, too.