The Weight of Unread Pages
It is 3:14 am. The house has finally stopped settling, and the silence is heavy enough to touch. I find myself thinking about the places we go when we are tired of being here. We open a book, or a memory, or a door that shouldn’t be opened, and we simply vanish. It is a quiet kind of desertion. We leave our bodies in the chair, our breath steady and rhythmic, while our minds wander into rooms where the rules of gravity no longer apply.
There is a safety in fiction that reality refuses to grant us. In the stories, the ending is already written, even if we haven’t reached it yet. There is no such comfort in the dark. Here, the questions remain unanchored. We are all just waiting for a light to flicker, hoping that if we read long enough, the world will turn into something softer, something that doesn’t demand so much of us. But the dawn is coming, and it never brings the answers we were looking for.
Elena Zakharova has captured this fragile suspension in her image titled Dreamy. It reminds me of the way we hide in plain sight, seeking refuge in worlds that belong only to us. Does the story ever really end, or do we just stop looking for the next page?
