Every Tuesday in my senior year of high school, I slipped out of class at exactly 12:40 pm, just after sixth period. While most other students left 2 periods later, I cherished the quiet stillness of my solitary dismissal.
Colors of music streamed from my headphones as I walked to the train station. Shades of light pink, deep purple, and neon green melted into crosswalks and corner stores. Leading me down a passage of not-too-distant memories, I found myself in Grand Central, walking along the tracks to Yankee Stadium and circling back to my bedroom in the Bronx.
Still, those memories couldn’t force my hands to retreat from the winter air. Book in hand, my right index curled along the corner of a page as I boarded my train. I made little progress during the walk, reading three pages at most. It was a feat of unwavering focus. A focus I maintained against steep hills and piercing wind. I took my seat and settled into my mind several stops in. The pinks, purples, and greens were slowly washed away by the subdued light of the train car. I couldn’t see them anymore. I was preoccupied with interpreting letters, polishing them into words, and constructing out of those words, sentences.
It’d been a long time since I read for myself. I spent a great deal of junior year piecing together broken parts of a puzzle, hoping they would fit into one another and make sense. All I remember of sophomore year is trying to read 1984 and banging my head against a wall. Not because I didn’t understand it. I couldn’t. For four years it seemed like the neural pathways of my brain were cut off. A pencil scribbled randomly across my mind’s eye and each year, it’s smudges pressed harder and harder until they hardened just enough to block the pathways.
As I approached Yankee Stadium, I made bets with myself to see how far I could go. Half slipping my backpack over my shoulder and half reading, my eyes didn’t lose focus. I never competed with the train until then. I reached the page’s end. I won.
Making my way through the station, I was careful not to obstruct the perfect flow of strangers all around. From an escalator to the new platform, I reread what I could only pay half my attention to. The Manhattan-Bound express 4 train is approaching the station. Please stand away from the platform edge. Away from the book and into the 4 and back to my book I went. I cared a little less for finding a seat.
Depression loves company. In the 8th grade, I didn’t think much of it and let it pass because I could afford to. But high school was not as kind. Being engrossed in thought, whisked away by vivid daydreams, unlikely scenarios, and fictional worlds — it all came to a halt. I stopped thinking. Soaking words like a sponge and retaining information — gone. As much as I desperately tried, reading was no easy task. I was stuck. The cogs in my brain began to collect dust.
This is 125th street. Transfer is available… Up the stairs I went. I wasn’t so eager, waiting for the 6. I stuffed myself into a train car on the far end. The closely knit web of strangers within unraveled and readjusted, yielding to those who entered. The passengers and their belongings, the metal railings and their handles, they clunked to the tremors of the floor as the train reverberated through tunnels. But I didn’t hear its sounds or feel its movements. I boarded my train of thought long before I boarded the 6. I’d already built 12 pages worth of sentences in my mind; the words, as if conscious, seemed to lift themselves off the pages. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, articles of all kinds, were working for me now. They built around me a black and white paper town, void of the passengers surrounding me.
I didn’t enjoy reading in high school. It turned literacy into a cold, calculated process separate from myself. I couldn’t personalize the words of Emerson or Eliot. I read, analyzed, and wrote, like a systemized assembly line. My reading was no longer my mine. I read like a machine. What had started as a mild emptiness festered into a Cobble’s knot deep in the pit of my stomach. Drowned by my school’s standardization and my desensitizing depression, my voice was muddled by the ink of America’s forefathers. I felt just as cold as literacy did.
The passengers slowly filed out of the train, emptying the car with each stop. I took my seat in a far end corner, a little island to myself. The train whizzed aboveground as it entered the Bronx, streams of sun pouring in as to envelope my skin. My workers fashioned the paper town into a world of its own, clearly defined and intricate. Its inhabitants, the characters from my book.
The next stop is… I raced to read the last bits and pieces for the day. Neatly tucking the book into my backpack pocket, I rejoined my music, letting myself fall back into its myriad of pinks, purples, and greens. I stepped onto the platform once again and marched home.
In my senior year of high school, I decided to read for myself. I was fed up with the self-pressure and my school’s expectations. I picked a book at random from the library. This is How I Find Her by Sara Polsky. I hadn’t been immersed like that in so long, and in a book no less. Suddenly, there was life in what I was reading, as if the author spilled droplets of reality into every word, every character. It was healing. No system, no classrooms, no complicated, 19th century syntax, no oversaturated philosophy. Just people and their lives. I liked reading again. I could reclaim it as my own. I took my first steps in undoing four years of knots.
I fiddled with my keys and unlocked our back door. Entering my still room, I took off my backpack, letting its weight fall off my shoulders. I dove for the bed. My back sunk into the mattress. I closed my eyes. My cogs began to turn.
