Old, musty pages between my fingertips. Short, bitten fingernails trying to scrape the surface of pages that have yellowed over the decades. I am trying to claw the words from the pages and bring the scene to life, make these fantasies a reality and escape another dreadful day. Life is gray for me, but these pages -- these 394 tattered pages with the broken binding that barely holds them together -- they bring color to my black-and-white world. Nothing must shatter this fragile atmosphere. I need silence; neither a hum of the television nor background music. I need complete and utter silence.

Your voice pierces my precious bubble, "What are you reading?"

"A book," I snap.

"Obviously," you snort.

I don't want to tell you. I don't want questions raised on every detail. I don't want to be laughed at for my personal tastes. I don't want to be distracted from these pages in front of me. This is my world right now, and I need to be a part of it, to breathe in the air of the story around me. I can feel myself inhaling the words as if it were an intoxicating aroma and it fills my lungs. I'm exhaling them and building the scene around me. Brice is rowing in his blow-up canoe, crashing into the underwater island on the lake and drowning. Brice is dead.

This book fills my veins with life. It overwhelms me with so many emotions. I have laughed, I have cried, I have fallen in love, I have become angry and I have had my breath taken away, but I will always have a passion rise out of me. These pages have saved my life. I wouldn't have survived this much of college. I wouldn't have survived home. I can be scorned for being on technology too much, but I cannot be punished for reading a small book that takes up no space on the table. This book isn't doing you any harm except for giving me a more plausible reason to ignore your negative words.

You're probably thinking, "What a freak. She'd rather read than have a conversation. How could someone possibly love reading this much?"

When your life is absolute sh*t or you keep hitting the same dead-end, these books create a portal to another world. Sometimes, music isn't enough. Some of us didn't have to privilege to have iPods, phones or laptops in high school. That's right, I lived without basic cable or Internet, so I had no other option except to find comfort elsewhere.

Now I have encountered a new problem: I actually hate finishing my books. Whether it is a happy or sad ending, afterward, I feel as if my life is meaningless once again. I feel the same way that I did when my heart was broken for the first time. I need a recovery period and in that recovery period, life is gray again. I linger for weeks, even years, thinking about the characters that became my friends and my family. The closure of the story isn't enough. I breathe these characters. I love them. I'm closer to them than I am to anyone else.

Recently, I have finished a novel by one of my favorite authors and I feel absolutely devastated that I finished it. The book was written in 1998, and it never had a sequel and never will. My throat started closing and my heart felt as if it was sinking into my stomach as the pages thinned until I reached the very last paragraph. I didn't want to finish it. I knew that if I finished it, it would be the last I'd see of Abby, Felicia and Willa. Yes, the end should have been satisfying, but no end is when you fall in love with a book.

A book will always break your heart because it has to end. Books were created for us lonely people, us sad folks. When all the medications in this world aren't working, a good book and some time alone will temporarily heal those wounds.

When I lost hope, I read.

Now, I read because I am free to be able to. No one can tell me to stop. My eyes have not yet gone blind. I am literate. So I will take advantage of these privileges and read until I can no longer see.