Sinner In A Church| a. arlert [ON HOLD]

ᴀɴᴛᴏɴʏ & ᴄʟᴇᴏᴘᴀᴛʀᴀ [𝟶𝟷]

"In time we hate that which we often fear," Antony and Cleopatra: Act 1 , Scene 3

Calling a book your best friend was kind of pathetic, maybe a little bit psychotic to some. But, there was nothing as reassuring as the feel of printed text beneath your fingertips. The soft rustling swipe of uncoated paper whenever you turned the page was terminal, as all good stories had to end eventually, yet the best stayed with you permanently. They were steadfast anchor in the sea of life that always provided salvation. Rescue from the perils that everyone experienced in life and launching them into a completely new reality, no matter how harrowing the tale may be.

If their reliability did not make them best friend material, you weren't exactly sure what did. You could cry and sympathise with them, constantly revisit them without being shunned or turned away, you could love them, like you could any good friend, and get to know them personally, too. Get to know that coffee stain on page two hundred and forty-three, from the time you knocked your cup over at the tea shop, get to know that crease on the back cover from when it fell from your over-populated shelf at a wrong angle and was dented- never same again, poor thing.

And more importantly, a good book got to know you, too. It got to know whether you were the kind to bend the spine the minute you purchased it, or whether you liked to keep everything intact, rather opening the book at an acute angle to prevent the spine from creasing. It got to know what your favoured time of the day to read was, it got to know whether you liked scented candles in the air or just the solace of you and words. It got to know what your favourite page was, what specific line had you sticking your tongue between your teeth to stop butterflies, or which paragraph killed you every time.

Because of a book's dependability, it was a major question as to why so many people opposed it? Children played pretend all the time, set up a kitchen and decided they were the most popular chef on the planet, rolled out the Play-Doh and decided that they were the hottest architectures to exist. Reading a book was more than playing pretend. It was bringing that love for imagination, that we hold so dear as children, into our adolescence, our adulthood, our elderly lives. In reality, everyone loves to play pretend, but as you age, a different kind of label is slapped onto it.

Having it between your hands felt like a talisman. Something that forebode any pressures of your normal life affecting the pure joy that surged through your system like a dangerous drug coursing through your veins. Every word was magic and had such a tempo that seemingly found you lost in a mixture of admiration and awe. By nature, humans were natural story-tellers, no matter what form. Some people liked a good gossip, some people liked to learn from their educators but one way or another, to understand anything, you needed a good story.

So now, as you peeked down at the lecture, allowing the September sunshine to wash over your skin, from the overhead windows, you considered as to why reading was such a frowned upon hobby. What on earth was boring about completely immersing yourself into a new reality, life, culture? Even as Joseph Addison said: reading to the mind, is what exercise is to the body. And now when you thought about the block-headed jocks who rushed around campus with more sweat patches than sweater-wearing pig in an oven, you decided they probably needed more mental exercise.