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Dangerously, Reading on the Edge

→ March 16, 2017 | Reading time: 2 minutes

It is still early in the afternoon; the sunlight warm, shards of it leaving one corner of the bed in relative comfort. I am reading Banana Yoshimoto on the e-Reader and it shows 26% on the bottom left. I tap-tap-tap to hide it. I mean to read up to a 50 and then leave for the studio. The lunch was pleasant and unsurprising (and therefore, pleasant) and the paper didn't seem to mind being left alone for another hour. Its appropriately academic-sounding prose has already started to show signs of promise despite a general lack of confidence and what any reviewer worth her salt would see is a typical case of inexperience. It simply didn't belong, yet.

The afternoon, balmy, is like a day-old factory siren, only that it binds one to the bed tighter. It is melting caramel, lulling one into a slow, sweet suspension of time and worries. Once inside, everything is distorted and one starts to believe in insignificant miracles again. It is ironic, almost tee-shirt worthily so, how sirens make one feel after teenage years spent waking up to a sorry excuse for one of those on winter mornings.

The screen catches light at a diagonal over the screen, as if in a freshly rendered advertisement while the dust, illuminated, does its dance as one moves into the comfier, corner-of-the-bed existence among the stuff that wouldn't belong there, had the bed itself belonged to someone else with some sense of shame.

It is three thirty and the book is, suddenly, over. I scroll ahead to see if the blank pages are some anomaly, and then backwards to make sure I haven't glossed over entire chapters. I read passages again as they resonate the right amount of déjà vu. The book doesn't feel real enough. It is as if I am being shortchanged. It isn't the story. I hadn't gone into it expecting a fairy-tale ending either. It is how the 100% mark creeps up unannounced. Maybe what it loses in translation from ink on paper to pixels off it is this sense of time. A sense that somehow cooks you up at a simmer for that last paragraph. e-Reading in that sense is no different from fast food. Or an electric shock.