From Reality to Reverie: A Life in Books

 

She had once believed in the world. She had stepped into it with open arms, with trust painted across her palms, with love unguarded and unmeasured. She had waited—for warmth, for understanding, for a place among them.  

But the world had never paused for her. It was relentless—an unforgiving tide of motion, of voices colliding without listening, of footsteps rushing without ever stopping.   

And so, one day, she stopped waiting for it to love her back.  

The city around her pulsed with chaos—honking horns, rushed footsteps, endless noise. It all pressed in on her with invisible claws, sharp and suffocating. Her chest rose and fell with rapid breaths, her heartbeat thudding in her ears like an unwanted anthem. The stress etched itself into her bones, and with trembling hands, she reached into her bag—not for pills or water, but for the only medicine that ever truly worked: a book.  

Peace. That was all she ever wanted. Not admiration. Not attention. Just peace.  

She found it in the quiet corner of her room, where a single bookshelf stood like a sacred shrine. Each book was a doorway, whispering promises of escape—of other worlds, better worlds. She sank into her chair and opened the cover like a priestess parting the veil. In that instant, the city faded. The noise dimmed. The harshness of the world slowly unraveled into silence.  

She stepped through the portal.  

Every page became a place. Every line, a person. Every chapter, a life. She wasn’t just reading stories—she was living them. In those fictional realms, she laughed freely, cried without judgment, and loved without fear. She wasn’t invisible here. Within those inked worlds, she was never too much or too strange. She was known, accepted, cherished. The characters welcomed her without questions. The words wrapped around her like arms that understood.  

And then came the moments—the magical ones—when a single sentence spoke her pain, or a paragraph mirrored the confusion she couldn’t explain. Tears would roll down her cheeks, not from sorrow, but from the overwhelming relief of being seen without having to say a word. She underlined those lines like treasures, ran her fingers across them reverently, whispering them like mantras. They became her water in the vast, sandy desert of loneliness.  

 

Because here, the words understood her. And she understood them back.

In the real world, she had always been too much. Too sensitive. Too trusting. Too loving. Too soft in a world that sharpened its edges. And her open heart had only earned her betrayal. Even those she called family had handed her silence where there should have been sanctuary. They didn’t understand her softness, her depth. They saw weakness where there was tenderness, foolishness where there was faith.  

But the books? They understood. They never turned her away.  

They became her mother, telling her bedtime stories when no one else did. They became her therapist, speaking truths she hadn’t found the words for. They became her friends, her family, her lovers, her guide. Through them, she learned empathy, courage, kindness. Through them, she saw that suffering was not hers alone to bear. The books reminded her that human pain was universal—and so was healing.  

And through them, she stopped being ashamed of feeling too deeply.  

In a world ruled by competition, jealousy, and noise, the book world offered quiet acceptance. No one asked her to prove her worth. No one judged her tears. There were no masks, no race to win. Just stories—endless stories—waiting to be lived. In them, she could be anything. Anyone. A thousand lives unfolded beneath her fingertips.  

And of course, she lived—thousands of lives. She walked through ancient kingdoms, strolled under alien skies, felt heartbreak in foreign tongues. She was never just one person in those pages. She was many. She was more.  

Reality soon felt like a foreign land. The people, their expectations, their cruelty—it all blurred into static. She stopped trying to fit into a world that never wanted her. She stopped waiting to be loved by those who didn’t know how. She no longer sought their approval. She no longer waited to be chosen. Instead, she returned to her books—her true home.  

In fiction, she chose the pages that never judged her. The stories that understood her unspoken sorrows. There, she didn’t just escape life—she discovered herself.  

And in that infinite, paper-bound fairyland, she finally found what the real world denied her: love, understanding, and the freedom to simply be.

 

And maybe, just maybe, that was enough.