Don’t judge a book by its cover
It’s been a while since I book-traveled. Yes, you read that right. I can dive into a book and live in its world. My family calls it book-travel, lazy right? I know you may think it’s fun and all, but just as Uncle Ben in Spiderman said, “With great power there must also come great responsibility.”
My family are what we call bookkeepers. We watch over the ideas of humanity. We weren’t really taught how or why we can do this, but we know the concept enough. People’s ideas are so strong that they conjure a whole new dimension, and written books are like spells. Letters are the runes with ink and paper, sealed, shut and shared-read. There you have it, a new world based on someone’s mind.
I wouldn’t go on a rant on how difficult it is to do it, but to be honest, it isn’t. We merely open a book, put one palm on the page we want to be flown into and there you have it, we are transported. Getting inside is easy, but getting out is the problem. See, when you try to enter the book, the idea, the dimension and the hold of its universe feel like invisible vines sinking into your veins from your feet all towards your brain, sitting there. I know because I felt it. At first, it holds you there and you know you’re rooted, but after a while, its grip slacks until it slowly pulls itself off you. At this time, you just have to take yourself out of the book. You just have to remember that you are not part of it.
Normally, us bookkeepers stay away from horror, thriller or fantasy books. We see them as horrendous creations. Why would anyone want to scare themselves? Or why would anyone want to create a world with dragons that can easily incinerate you. Well, after a few enraged exchanges with my parents, I got my answer. People want to escape, and that’s just what I did.
Storming off, I ran inside our big library where my parents keep all the books they have traveled into. I was crying and heaving, tasting salt as tears reached my mouth. They were arguing about their divorce and just now, they were arguing who would be taking me.
I was so lost in my own head that I did not bother to look where I was going until I fell face first on the carpeted floor. Crying, I shifted to my side, smelling dust and coughing it out. The first thing that came to my mind as I saw the books at the bottom of the shelves was why they were there in the first place. Mom said they were the least interesting books and so no one would read them, no one would want to go inside and it would be best to place them at the bottom. I wondered if I were a book, would they place me at the bottom of the shelf too? Both of them said they didn’t want me. And so, I grabbed a book.
Its cover was enchanting with the darkest green vines and pale chrysanthemums all around, a gold accent followed the vines and I thought whatever, this must be a pretty boring book anyway. I read the title “Butterflies”, and I dived in without a care in the world, knowing what I just did wasn’t protocol.
The first thing I felt when I emerged into the world was the icy cold feeling. My eyes felt dry despite my tears, and when I opened them, all I saw was nothing. I see darkness everywhere. I couldn’t see my hands or feel the floor although I was walking on something. There was no texture, nothing at all. Walking on whatever it felt like getting anesthetics for my feet. It felt numbing. And then it hit me, the pressure started, the crawling of the book’s existence flooding me inside. It reached my brain and it sounded like a click of a lock.
Panic surfaces inside my brain. I never felt a click like that before. I never felt this numb or this cold or this nothingness. One moment was all it took to dawn on me that there was pain growing at the pit of my stomach. Emptiness. I felt hungry, no, thirsty. I clenched my fists in reflex and felt them pruney, like the water, the blood was sucked out of me. The pain grew until I felt it throbbing all around my body that I shrieked, hugging myself in comfort, but there was no comfort. There was just nothing.
I must have dozed off after that, because when I awoke, I felt numb again. No pain anymore. I was surprised to feel myself standing. I dozed off standing. Then I caught a whiff of a scent I have never smelled before. If you’ve smelled a rotting corpse, which I knew in one of my travels, this was worse. I covered my mouth and felt my skin was still pruney, hands and face. The scent still reached my nose despite my efforts. Running blindly to get away from the stench, it occurred to me that it was everywhere. No matter where I went, the rot, the deterioration and the slow heavy musk sent me reeling. I wanted to throw up but I couldn’t. I wanted to cry but there were no tears. I was nothing.
And it was a cycle.
I felt cold again.
I felt numb.
I felt pruney fingers.
I smelled rot.
I felt nothing.
I was nothing.
It felt like years. Thousands of years. Until.
Click. I tried to scream but there was nothing to shout. Why was I here? What was I doing? Who was I?
I felt a grip unfurling and slowly vanishing. That’s when I remembered. Home. I wanted to go home.
The tug of my own world picked me up and I felt like I was violently heaved off and thrown back into light.
“Wake up!” Mom’s voice was everything at that moment. My eyes opened and four hands were all around me. Mom and dad. “Don’t do that again!” She was shaking and crying too.
I was still and shock coursed through me. I was alive, I did not feel it anymore. My eyes darted to the side where the book was most likely thrown away by my parents. It laid there, the first page opened to the word Death.
It took me three more days to recover, enough to pretend I was okay. If I was being honest, I think it felt like weeks until speaking did not hurt anymore. And even now, I still have nightmares about it. The book that I opened turned out to be a real recounting of a woman who had died and came back from death. Dad said it was why I felt a lock inside my head. The idea was not fiction, it wasn’t made-up. It was real. They were memories. And it was what she felt during death.
My skin shivers at the thought of going back into that book. Mom and dad had moved all the books placed at the bottom of the shelf to a new and secured room. They thought that by putting all deadly books in plain sight and marking them as uninteresting, we would not touch it and leave it alone. Mom was the one who traveled inside it first and the thought of dying scared her because of it.
As I recall now, it should have been obvious to me who studies symbolisms and literature. Chrysanthemums are the flowers of death.