Elizabeth

Imagine you're a writer, and there are people scribbling in the margins of your books, underlining their favorite passages, leaving makeshift bookmarks between the pages (subway tickets, library receipts, handwritten notes), reading excerpts out loud to their friends and lovers or to themselves just to feel the words on their tongue, memorizing quotes and then copying them in their notebooks, daydreaming about your characters and excitingly speculating about what's going to happen to them in the sequel, writing reviews in their school newspaper.

remember when it was safe® to go outside and you could throw on a coat and grab your bag and take the bus downtown and wander around the street, maybe dipping into a few bookstores along the street, as the sky got dark and the air got that little bite of chilliness into it and you could flip through all the notebooks and paperbacks and touch things and have a conversation with the vendor and see their entire face and then go sit in a cafe and drink coffee and eat a bagel, bumping into people but not minding bc it wasn’t like they could give you a deadly virus, and then go home all happy and rosy-cheeked without a care in the world? yea, me neither.

the reason you were able to read more and do more activities in a day when you were a kid than you do as an adult isn’t because you got stupider, it’s because as a child you generally had your base needs taken care of and your schedule provided to you, so you didn’t have to use as much of your mental and physical energy on planning, life maintenance (ie food and administrative tasks), and general executive function. of course you could focus on reading a novel in two days, somebody else made your lunches and you never thought about phone bills and you didn’t even have to decide for yourself when to take a bath. c’mon