Friend Auksė kindly agreed to let me post her writing from today's Wednesday Writing Club. The piece so clearly delights in the memory of that first-time experience of becoming a lifelong reader.
(Auksė 15-03-2023)
I remember
that day so vividly, although it all disappeared in a huge sweeping motion as
if the minutes and hours were blown away by the wind of somebody else’s
imagination. I had waited for the Lithuanian translation of the third or the
fourth book for some months, I think. I was a Harry Potter fan since the very
first book, though I read it after my mom – I guess I was too young to see its
potential right away, the prospect of showing me what a few hundred sheets of
paper with monotonous rows of signs could do for my young head.
I’ve heard
somewhere that reading is like hallucinating. You stare at an unmoving surface
for hours, turning sheet after sheet of processed, pressed trees, and the most
colourful and fabulous images appear in your brain. You hear voices, and you feel
feelings; your own and those of the people, creatures, plants and objects in
the story.
That day I curled up in bed in the morning – I don’t think I even got out of my pyjamas, since it was a school holiday – and I started reading. My nanny, whom I still call my third grandmother or simply grandma, would occasionally enter the room and ask if I was hungry. I was not hungry but accepted a glass of sweet quince juice. I didn’t have time for food, as I was flying on my broom at a quidditch match, learning new charms, or making potions.
After such intense mornings and afternoons of reading, I would continue in my sleep. Turning pages in the middle of the night, eyes closed, body relaxed, my brain making up new magic stories – but now with me as a student in the School of Wizardry.
(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)
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