I haven't read a book in months.

The reader in me is parched, shriveled, drying out like a raisin in the sun.

She is spent, her imagination broken, her eyes sore.

Naked under the rain, she is drenched, cold, hyperventilating.

The reader in me is mute,

Between my bones, she is thrashing, drowning,

Feeling her lungs clog with water.

She spends all day collecting books she can't stand,

Books that were once her tickets to countless destinations,

Are now mere postcards with snapshots of a few.

The reader in me is exhausted,

Books now make her dizzy,

The edges of words stings her eyes,

The margins of paragraphs make her heart race.

I walk around shamefully,

In my head when I walk on the streets,

The passers-by can see through us,

Glimpsing the turmoil within.

They are looking at me despicably,

Turning their lips to produce words that elevate my shame,

"Look at her, a reader since birth," they whisper,

"People say she hasn't read a book in months."

"I heard once that she read 21 hours in a day, refusing to drop the book like a drowning soul clinging to a life raft,"

"It is so scandalous to even think about"

"Imagine her shelves covered in dust and her books courting cob webs"

"May the readers within us never suffer the same fate,"

"For how would we even survive without words?"

As they scuttle away, their cruel words linger,

With echoes of judgment that cut deeper than they know.

~Tolu-petu