LITERARY | To the books I bought, but never read

I bought you on days when time felt generous.

On afternoons when the sky was slow and kind, when I believed I could sit by a window and let the world be small. I held you in my hand like something I will never let go of. Unceased pages, unbroken spines, stories waiting patiently beneath your covers. I told myself I would read you soon. I would.

Soon became later.

Later became not now.

Life arrived louder than your breath-held paragraphs. Deadlines pressed harder than your paper edges. Responsibilities grew teeth and called my name each morning. I carried you from room to room, from one place to another, from one version of myself to the next. You gathered dust while I gathered worries.

I bought you when I had time.

I lost that time to becoming.

There were years when reality sank into my skin more than any hardcover. I chose emails over epilogues, reports over romance, survival over stories. The world outside your pages demanded urgency. The world inside you offered patience. And patience, I thought, was a luxury.

Yet I never let you go.

You remained on my shelves like wordless companions. Your titles whispered at night. Your unopened chapters waited without resentment. You did not ask why I abandoned you. You did not accuse me of neglect. You simply stayed.

And then there are nights.

Nights when the world feels too sharp, when the noise of living grows unbearable. On those nights, I reach for you not as a reader, but as someone seeking refuge. I open you the way one opens a door during a storm. I let your sentences ferry me where my bones can rest, where the ground forgives, and where the air is kinder than the present.

I read you not because I finally have time,

but because I need to escape it.

Between your lines, I find versions of myself I almost forgot. The dreamer who once believed in still-let afternoons. The person who bought books not to survive, but to feel. Inside your pages, reality unwinds its tension. The clock forgets. I remember that life can be more than a list of tasks.

To the books I bought, but never read,

you are not markers of what slipped away.

You are proof that I once hoped, that I believed I deserved stories. That even in the busiest seasons, I longed for another world.

Perhaps one day I will read you in full, not as an escape, but as a companion. Not because reality is heavy to bear, but because it has softened its edges.

Until then, wait for me.