My Year of Rest and Relaxation

It is five months into the year, and I am finishing my first book of 2024. I have taken an extended vacation from reading. Well, less a vacation, and more a tailspin into sustained but variable crisis, wherein I reserve reading for my visits to the depressive hospitalizations. The manic ones tend to not leave much room for literature. Against the Day and Earthlings were exceptional experiences, I savored both, perfect novels, but upon discharge, I did not re-engage my longstanding love for reading, because life proved consistently to overwhelm. But here I am, sitting in a crisis center, having just finished this book, and about to read Smoke and Mirrors by Gaiman, with my return to University to finish an English Literature degree three years abandoned impending, and I think I have finally struck it, the passion, the fervor, for literature. I am tumbling headlong after a long dormancy, a long but fitful sleep, into embracing words as my future, the future for which I have pined but which I have avoided for two decades. Thank you, Ottessa, for helping me wake up.