Books
♫
☰
★
❖
Sometimes, late at night, I let myself imagine a world without books, and it makes me shudder. Life would feel unbearably boring, stretched out like an endless grey afternoon with nothing to fill it. No stories to lose myself in, no characters to meet, no worlds to escape into whenever reality felt too dull.
Without books, there would be no chance for fantasy. No wizards casting spells, no hidden kingdoms tucked behind wardrobes, no dragons soaring above castles. My imagination, the one thing that made ordinary days feel extraordinary, would simply have nowhere to go.
And with fantasy gone, so too would vanish all sense of magic. That quiet thrill of turning a page and discovering something impossible, something wonderful, would disappear completely. The world would feel smaller, flatter, far less alive than it does now.
I would also lose every cliffhanger that ever kept me awake past bedtime, desperate to know what happened next. That delicious agony of waiting, wondering, imagining endings, it would all be gone, replaced by nothing but silence.
Worst of all, my bookshelf would sit empty and forgotten, gathering dust instead of stories. It would look awful, hollow, stripped of the colourful spines that once held entire universes. Without books, I fear I would lose a piece of myself I did not even know I needed.