The Books That Wait for You
The first book I read after the drought wasn’t the heavy therapeutic tome I had expected to break the curse. It was a romance novel - Part of Your World by Abby Jimenez - and I devoured it in one day flat. Wyatt beamed when I turned the last page. I cried. Not because the book was life-changing (though it was wonderful - a story about generational trauma, abusive dynamics, and rebuilding that cut closer to the bone than I had expected). But because for the first time in months, I’d remembered how to leave my body without disappearing and how to let a story pull me under without drowning.
The Slow Unraveling
Before: The years when reading was breath. I had been a hyperlexic and lonely child, and books were my first escape. As I got older, that only became more true. Reading was sport - I’d crack spines and bleed highlighters over paragraphs, margin notes crowding pages like analytical graffiti. Physical communion. Depth-devouring. Fiction, theory, fantasy - all fuel. I’d finish a 500-page epic and start the next before dawn.
Then: The fraying.
At first, audiobooks only - words needed audio to penetrate my static.
Then only familiar genres - fantasy’s narrative rhythms felt like migratory bird paths - reliable, yet each flight uniquely shaped by the winds of the author’s magic systems and world maps.
Then after the death of my father, only romance - the guaranteed warmth, the safety net of a happy ending.
By August 2023, even romance novels fell like stones from my hands. Words didn’t just feel heavy; they felt like black holes. Matter collapsing under C-PTSD gravity. Letters on a page, a voice in my ear - all just noise ricocheting in a hollowed-out skull. Dissociation doesn’t erase language; it can suspend it in formaldehyde. Preserved, yes, but lifeless - specimens behind glass. Books became lost to me, and I wasn’t sure if I would get them back. I was devastated.
Why This Book?
Not because it "healed" me. Not because it held answers.
Because its rhythm was a landing strip for my nervous system.
Warmth. Predictability. Safety.
A love story yes, but one that didn’t flinch from rot - generational trauma like mold in the walls, abuse dressed as love, the visceral cost of rebuilding. None of it felt like a demand. Just an offering.
The protagonist’s journey mirrored mine in ways that ached - but that wasn’t why it worked.
It worked because I could follow the thread of a narrative without getting lost. Because for 24 hours, my brain didn’t feel like a minefield. Because the happy ending wasn’t a lie; it was a temporary neurological balm.
Dissociation Is a Library Fine
My brain didn’t lose reading. It pressed pause.
Like a book checked out and left on a nightstand while the overdue notices pile up.
The debt wasn’t negligence - it was self-preservation. A system conserving energy when the cost of processing words exceeds the reserves.
Holding Part of Your World in my hands again - physically - felt like breaking a spell.
The weight of it. The smell of paper. The cover under my thumb. Proof I could touch a book without retreating. Proof I could be here (in this body, with its betrayals) and elsewhere (in a world where joy was guaranteed) at the same time.
Why Romance? The Sanctuary of Structure
Predictable joy isn’t escapism. It’s survival.
Genre conventions are cognitive handrails: the meet-cute, the conflict, and the resolution. No surprises to trigger hypervigilance. No moral homework disguised as plot. The guaranteed happy ending isn’t naïve - it’s a neurological ceasefire.
And this book? It knew the weight of darkness. Held abuse without aestheticizing it. Named generational trauma without demanding I "learn" from it. Safety first. Complexity second.
What Reading Really Is
Reading is not an escape, but a refuge.
A rehearsal for holding tension: being here (in a body that aches) and there (in a story that holds you) simultaneously. A practice run for staying present while drifting.
I don’t know if I’ll ever read like I used to - highlighters deployed like weapons, margins dense with ink.
But I know the books will wait.
They tally no absence, and they charge no interest on my grief or dissociation.
And when my nervous system whispers safe instead of run?
They will greet me without demands, without judgment: "Welcome back. We missed you."