The Weight of Paper Worlds

I keep a small, frayed bookmark made of pressed clover inside a book I have not opened in twenty years. The clover has turned the color of dried tea, brittle enough to crumble if I breathe too heavily upon it, yet it holds the exact shape of a summer afternoon spent under an oak tree. When we are young, we do not just read stories; we inhabit them, folding ourselves into the margins until the ink and our own skin seem to share the same pulse. We lose the room, the chair, and the ticking clock, trading the heavy gravity of the real world for the weightless geography of a dream. It is a quiet surrender, a way of stepping through a door that only exists when we are brave enough to look away from the light of the present. What happens to the parts of us that stay behind in those paper forests, long after we have turned the final page and returned to the quiet of our own rooms?