What It Feels Like To Get Lost In A Book

Curl up in your bed, on the floor, the backseat of a car, the plastic bench of a train. Open up a book and walk into another person’s mind. Revel in the fact that you are looking into the crux of another human being. Get lost in the intricacies of the world they’re painting, in the nuances of their creativity, flowing and twisting into worlds fabricated out of thin air.

Fall so deeply into this imagined world, forget where you are. Stare at the pages as walls around you fall away, and words build new ones in their stead. Stop hearing anything that isn’t on the page in front of you. Let technology and love and friends and problems dissipate as you leave them behind, forget that there is anything other than you and the world in your hands.

Pull out a book when you need a break. Start crying in public. Forget that you are sitting under a tree in a park or at your desk at work. Those tears, emotions, feels, they are a beautiful reminder of the power of the written word, of the ability of something created entirely out of nothing, to make you feel genuine things.

Getting lost in a book is like getting hit by a truck, like waking up at 10 pm from a nap. It is disorienting beyond belief, startling, life affirming. It is getting slapped in the face and then warmly embraced. It is sitting in a hot tub and then jumping into a pool of freezing water, sending shocks to your system that make you jolt up, open your eyes, gasp.

Getting lost in a book feels like déjà vu, like visiting a place you’ve been a thousand times in a past life. It feels like all the thoughts on the tip of your tongue and meandering musings yet unsaid. It is to delight in the secret deepest darkest pleasures of your own soul and unabashedly bask in the glow of eternal possibility.

Getting lost in a book is to be a child again, to play make-believe as an adult. It is pillow forts and imaginary friends. It is to be unreachable by all you wish to be invisible from, to be happily floating, and willingly unrooted. It is to be cerebrally content and unconsciously aware of the expansion of your own mind.

To get lost in a book is not to get lost at all. To get lost in a book is simply to find yourself in worlds yet discovered.