"Read in order to live."

Nearly a month has gone by and I have hardly touched a single book. I've read a few chapters of Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix, but that is all. I am feeling the toll that what not reading takes on me. I haven't not read in so long that I had forgotten this happens. Whenever I stop reading for a while, there are a few things I do not like that slowly begin to happen. They rather depress me and I had not realized until just very recently that this is what has been going on.

One of the things that happens is that I am more likely to slip when talking. I have more tongue-twists when I have not spoken any words that would typically create them. Another thing that happens is I begin to lose words from my vocabulary in not just speech but in writing as well. I will feel as I type that fewer words are inhibiting my word bank. I may typically view the difference in my quality of writing through graded essays as well when I read less, but I am no longer enrolled in classes so this one is not affecting me this time around.

It must surely sound crazy to some people that by stopping reading I will notice such things as I do and so quickly, but I am well-tuned and throughout my life have always noticed the difference reading makes. It improves one's speech, writing, and settles one's mind as they can remember what word it is they are trying to think of. My learning disability, I was told, is a partial one, that I am neither here nor there with either those who are ordinary and those with full-blown learning disabilties. I was not given the help I needed and spend many years struggling not knowing I could cure myself with merely the reading of books. It's sad that I didn't discover this till college, but reading does so much for me, and to read regularly is something I coin as taking a dose of medicine. I know what it is I must do to receive a dose of words and I think it is time I pluck a book from one of my shelves, turn back the cover, and begin to read. I think I will do this very soon.

A Splinched Life

Daemon torn away, I haven't much had the desire to read these last two weeks. I also haven't been able to rid my head of the boy in Lyra's world of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials who held onto a dead fish for dear life. So suddenly I lost such a dear one to me as my greatest companion, who was fit as could possibly be. He was everything to me. I was left feeling I could do nothing that I did before. Life moves, though, and all of me was forced to as well but for reading without him beside me.

I cannot imagine reading without his blondish-orange fur in arms reach where I can pet and stroke him as I read. Or the fact that his nose will never again rub my wrists while he tried to steer my attention away from whatever book I would be reading. No more purrs or smiles of satisfaction as I breaked from reading and rubbed his ears. No more walking with him over my shoulder through the house, or of him turning up from no where to sit on my lap when I had been feeling sad.

He will not test any new bookshelves nor jump around in them with his sister who is so lonely without him. Always they had been a set to mind, like ying and yang perhaps. There could never be one without the other. No Aloft without Aloof. They were a pair, and how could one be complete without the other? The balance would not exist. Aloft is feeling the splinching of her other half.

Half of me is also missing these last couple weeks and I won't get it back. Nothing can change it, though, so I either have to read and probably sob doing so for the first few attempts or not read at all. I miss books, I really do. Nothing like I miss him, of course.

I couldn't make sense of it but I see there are differnces, though why I had to loose him for those differences are so very nastily cruel. I am not a religious person, but I feel the need to scream and kick and shout and beat the damn freaking you-know-what out of someone. I want my baby back. He is gone, forever. Why did this have to happen?!

Still struggling to care enough to turn the front cover of a book and read.

Cannot Read, Urgh

I think my current book is being thought of rather poorly without it being it's fault. The beginning was great - I kept picturing scenes from the film version I saw as a child - but I've been having trouble reading it for the last several days. I hate how being down gets me behind on reading. I just can't seem to read more than a page or two lately. This book will sadly not get the good opinion it probably deserves. I feel bad for that, but I just can't read right now.