I love my bedroom. My tall ceiling and cream white walls mounting the decorations that I so carefully hand selected to exhibit the distinct aesthetic I strive to express. My room holds the faces of the sun and the moon and those of bands from Fleetwood Mac to Nirvana and The Foo Fighters. Old vinyls and CD’S sprawl across the minuscule sherpa rug opposite my record player, in a specific order of rotation that I routinely play. My handbuilt bookshelf is decoupaged with pages from Twilight, withholding the overflowing mass of novels I have. Wonderful descriptions and diction From Brontë to Poe and Harry Potter to the cheesiest romance novel, I have the perfect bookshelf tailored to me. The stickers that cover small portions of my wall show the places I've been and things I've picked up along the way. Vibrant fairy lights and dark green vines intertwine and hang on the walls and ceiling, beckoning me to find new routes of patterns as they canopy above my head. My soft, supple bed that moves to conform to my body is where I find serenity. 

Every night, within these walls, under the dull, quiet glow of my room is where I meet my hero. I never fully appreciated the beauty and complexity of a good book until this time last year. Until I could no longer control the continual whirring cyclone of my thoughts, that threatened to sweep me into the eye of its storm; or until I found myself staring at the wall every endless night, hoping that sleep would bargain with me soon and drift me elsewhere. Since then, reading holds onto every feeling I am trying to rid. It grasps my never-ending anxieties and safely tucks them between each line of the story unraveling before me. The folds and creases of my tattered paperbacks contain the same consolation another might find from a tranquil melody or a hot cup of tea. I allow myself to slip away into the book that I so desperately grip, eager to indulge in the beauty that is literature. The dog-eared, yellow-toned pages and indented pen-ink formed into mindless doodles and annotated passages reminding me of which books I've read and which I have not yet touched. Within these pages hold words I would not dare utter aloud and words I wish I could articulate. 

I relish in the secretiveness of reading a book,  only disclosing the title of the cover in which I clutch to my nose. Reading is akin to a secret only I share; there is nothing as personal as knowing a book's entire contents and it in turn knowing mine.The only visible giveaways of the knowledge I acquire being the slight furrow of my brow or crease in my forehead. I solely let my book down once I finish it cover-to-cover and only then I let my mind work itself repeatedly over each detail I had read. I hold each book's secrets abutting to my heart and let the echoes of queries and theories ring throughout my head. Oh, how I wish I could get captivated in my own life like how I get completely engrossed in a story’s tale. 

I knew it was time to open a book when my mind would not quiet and I could feel the panic rising in my chest; or when my tears mimicked the falling rain outside my window, leading me to blink them away and attempt to refocus my eyes on the blurring black ink below me. The singular way I could nurture my mind during the sleepless, insomnia- ridden nights was to crack open whatever book I laid my hands on first. Trying my best to force out any unwelcome and untame ruminations. Sleep would not find me easily, but reading until the “Acknowledgements'' page of a book always did. I read until I could read no more; until the morning sun poured in through the sheer fabric of my curtains and onto my open book, harshly catapulting me back into reality. My books should wear red billowing capes and a sleek iron sword because reading did what all heroes do, it saved me.