The Year I Stopped

The book arrived and I opened it

like an obligation, like a promise

I'd made to myself in some other year

when I still believed reading would save me.

Two pages in and nothing catches.

The sentences are fine. The prose

is fine. The characters are doing

what characters do.

But I don't care.

I don't care what happens next,

and that's the moment I know

this isn't about the book.

This is about the year it stopped,

the year I stopped, somewhere between

scrolling and working and the exhaustion

of pretending to want things.

I close it.

The bookmark sits on page two

like a tiny flag of defeat.

Around me are other books, half-read, abandoned,

stacked in the corner like evidence

of a crime I committed against myself.

I don't feel guilty. I don't feel

like I should feel.

I just feel the specific emptiness

of a room full of unopened worlds,

and I'm too tired to care that I'm not

curious anymore. Too tired to miss

the girl who read until three AM.

She's gone. This is what replaced her—

a person who holds a book,

reads the first page,

and already knows she won't come back.