INKED

Books ruined me. It ruined me in ways completely unimaginable. The time and money I
spend on books is ridiculous. If you’re a reader, then I know that we both agree that books should
come with a huge warning sign.
Books either make you, or break you.
Books ruined my ability to love real boys because of the standards I have made. The standard
that boys in books made me believe was possible to attain.
Books ruined my body clock. You’d find me awake at two in the morning, reading a book
I’ve read twice while drinking a warm cup of tea.
Books ruined my ability to look at bright places because hidden in a book’s cover are its dark,
annoyingly small-fonted pages.
Books ruined, well, life. You take a remarkable book with remarkable characters in a remarkable
story and finish it. Devour it. Then, it will hit you. Those things never happened. Those people
don’t exist.
They’re all paper, inked.
You’ll cry or maybe just stare into space and do your best to get over it. It may take days,
maybe weeks to try and shift back to reality. You wait for it, the shift.
Maybe books did ruin me or it will lead to my downfall, but I can never give back those
moments I spend between the pages. For a while you will feel that they were with you and you were
looking at them and for a while you believed it was true.
In the end, it will hurt or disappoint you because whether they get a happy ending or a Greek
tragedy, the real ending is you, sitting on your bed or the couch or the cold bathroom floor. You think
“what now?” and think about how to live normally again.
At the end of the day, you may feel sad and lonely, but at least for three-hundred pages or so,
you were happy.

That’s all that matters.