On the pages that held me when I couldn't hold myself
There was a stretch of time last summer when I was never without a book in my hand.
I read in the car before work, in the breakroom at lunch, on the couch after dinner, and in bed long after the house had gone still. Every spare moment, every pause in the noise of life, I filled with words that weren’t my own.
Nine, sometimes ten books a month. I moved through them like air. I’d close one, reach for another, and disappear again. It wasn’t discipline or even passion that kept me going. It was survival.
Reading was the only place that didn’t hurt. Between the pages, I didn’t have to think about everything that was falling apart. I could live inside someone else’s story: one with structure and purpose, where things made sense and endings came on time. In a season when my own life felt fractured, fiction became a kind of oxygen.
Looking back, I can see how frantic it was. The pace. The hunger. I wasn’t just reading... I was running.
But somewhere along the way, the need softened. The urgency faded.
I started to look up again. At the light through the window, the sound of the boys laughing in another room. I’d finish a chapter and let the silence stay. I didn’t always reach for the next book right away.
I still read, of course. I always will. But now, it feels different.
It’s not an escape hatch anymore; it’s a companion. Something that steadies me, that moves with me instead of pulling me away. The pace is slower, the pull gentler now. I can close the cover and step back into my own life, one that, little by little, feels like a story worth living again.
Books have always been there: a quiet refuge when the world felt too loud, a steady friend when everything else around me shifted. They carried me through the hardest parts and reminded me of who I was when I started to forget.
They don’t need to hold me up anymore. But they still hold me — in the ways that matter, in the quiet that follows the chaos.
Now, the words don’t carry me away... they carry me home.
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