Since I have a notoriously bad memory, I don’t recall every detail about my early experiences, but I know that they have shaped me to become who I am today. Some things I do remember are the bookshelf next to my couch, my Peter Pan paperback, and my fascination with stories dancing on the pages of a book. The well loved photo albums collecting dust in my basement help fill in my memory. Photographs reveal my sister and I sitting on the living room floor in our matching pajamas with stacks of picture books spread around us. I used to take out all of the books on the shelf and “read” them for hours, my eyes glossing over the actual words on the page, refocusing to look at the pictures.
     My interests were shaped by those stacks of books. My obsession with Disney characters stemmed from the Disney books, never the movies, since I found it fascinating to listen to my mother’s voice soothingly read me the story. In my house, it was always books over television. It was my mom that chose my first books. She loves literature herself and thankfully passed that gene to me through our regular trips to the library and outings to Barnes and Noble to sit on the floor and read book after book. Twirling off of the pages, settling into my heart was the brunette, beast-loving princess, Belle. She was intelligent, beautiful, and accepting of others; someone I admired. She loved books so therefore I loved books, too. Belle was captivated by the giant library in the Beast’s castle and because of that I always looked towards reading with that same awe. I imagined myself running through the library in the palace, I imagined my yellow dress swirling as I walked with a book in hand, I imagined myself feeling inseparable from books. Just like Belle.
     In these books, my mom and I put stickers over the faces of the scary Disney characters;  stickers created my first physical connections to literature. I put smiley faces over Ursula and her creepy yellow-eyed sidekick eels Flotsam and Jetsam, I put stars over the hyenas in the Lion King and hearts over Tick Tock the crocodile in Peter Pan. I would color on the pages and mark them up with stickers since to me, as a toddler, they were pieces of paper with pictures and some other squiggles, which turned out to be words, on them. When I marked them up, I learned to interact with books in more than one way. Literature has always felt comfortable to me.
     The weight of a book in my hands, fingers flipping the pages, my eyes scanning the word. We beat books up pretty bad. My sister and I had a ritual:  Every morning at breakfast, we picked out two picture books from the shelf. While eating breakfast we each read one book and then switched. This action of reading two books at breakfast each day became a part of my day, just as natural as brushing my teeth in the morning. We picked from the same selection of books on the same bookshelf for so long that I still can repeat back to you some pages found in the Berenstain Bears books. When we tired of our usual books we switched to reading the recipes in our Strawberry Shortcake cookbooks.
     When middle school started, my daily life changed. I got up at 6:30 every morning not to read for one hour before school and take my time, but to quickly get dressed, pack up my bag, and eat breakfast all before 7:30. By this point, I was fully committed to lengthy chapter books that I could no longer finish in a morning. I gradually moved away from eating up words as a part of my breakfast ritual to eating as quickly as I could to get ready for school. It became harder to carve out time for a chapter or two daily as I made my way through the rigorous school system and my increasing amount of extracurricular activities.
     As high school came around, I grew from reading everyday to rarely reading for leisure. My demanding schedule made my beloved daily activity nonexistent.
     However, this type of separation makes me cherish the moments I have reading books even more. Pages of a book are not simply that, they hold meaningful stories rthat are an author’s cherished craft. On holidays, vacations, long weekends and in the summer I find myself craving the peace I get when curling up with a book. When I read books now I still have the same ability to get lost in the story for hours on end that I did when reading about Belle, the Berenstain Bears or my cookbooks.
     I have traded Disney princess stickers for Post-It notes and replaced Captain Hook with Tobias Eaton, but I savor them the same. The cracking of the binding of a new book and the fresh and welcoming pages reach my senses before the words process in my brain. When reading went from a regular part of my day to a special occasion, this gave me a much bigger appreciation for the time I spend reading. Each picture I have seen, each word I have read has made a tiny imprint on my heart, making an everlasting impact on my identity.