Sprawled sideways on the sand, I tried to get through the first sentence of a short story in my book, but each time my eyes reached the end of it I’d already forgotten what I’d just read and was forced to start from the beginning again. I certainly was reading the words, just not processing them—a realization that frustrated me.
Usually, when I concentrated on reading the words, they traveled from the page into my brain, but, given my newfound incompetency, I wondered where the words went after I read them if they never made it into my brain. I doubted the existence of a word limbo, a special place to harbor all the lost words, but I also knew that they had to go somewhere. I imagined the words coming off the page and floating toward my brain but then, inexplicably, falling from midair into the sand where they were lost forever.
I feared the guilt I would inherit when I looked back to the page of my book and saw, in place of the words I had just read, a blank space. I would have to be careful not to read any more of the words because I would be the one responsible for losing them in the sand—the monster infamous for destroying all the beautiful words in all the great books of literature.
-A tiny excerpt from my forthcoming novel: Isn’t It Pretty To Think So?
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