The Reading Tickets
When I was little, I loved stories. Stories of all kinds, but especially fairytales. I loved to imagine myself in their world, a world filled with gloomy forests and magic dancing lights. A world where everyone was seeking or journeying, reaching further and testing the limits of bravery and kindness. But there was one problem: I couldn't read. At least, not well enough or fast enough to feed my voracious appetite for the magical stories. And so I begged my mother to read to me, tugging on her bathrobe the moment she stepped out of the shower, pulling at her apron while she whirled about the kitchen, and clutching onto the sash of her dress when she and my father headed out for an evening.
We would curl up on a couch and be transported to a swirling, blooming land of deception and miracles. I remember those afternoons, the hot cups of sweet tea, chilled with a splash of milk. The journeys that would take hours but be over in the blink of an eye. The feeling of flying. But no matter how much I wished it, my stories weren't real. I wasn't really flying and I didn't really live in Neverland. And so, I had to grow up.
And as I grew, I learned to read faster and understand larger words. And then, my world suddenly became busy. I would bring a book to my mom and she would tell me to go read it on my own. And I did, and I loved the stories all the same, but it was colder and more terrifying up on the magic carpet without my mother beside me. But I embraced the bite and the sting of the wind because it filled that empty space inside of me--but only temporarily, for all its immenseness, for all its awesome, sweeping power, the wind flickered and fell away all too quickly.
I don't think she was trying to push me away; she loved our journeys too. How do I know? The reading tickets. Every time she had another matter to attend to, when she said she would read me a story on a weekend or before bed and then couldn't, she would take a piece of paper and write "1 free story" on it. It was a coupon of sorts--a promise that we would have our moment, if I would only wait a little bit--and it placated me. It placated us both. I carefully placed these slips of paper in a small green box and kept them high up on my shelf. I thought that my box was just like a bank, that I was saving up all of these wonderful moments to be had later on, that I would redeem them all in due time and that they would be all the more sweet for my wait. I was like that as a child, I loved to save and savor--I didn't realize that things could just disappear.
Over time, the tickets shrank, becoming small strips of paper, a torn corner of a napkin, a sliver of a piece of scrap paper--whatever was quickest and easiest to grab when I approached my mother for a story. But still, the pile grew. And I often took the box down from time to time to finger the tickets and stare at them, making the paper smudge and smear until they began to fall apart. And perhaps it's a blessing, then, that we moved and the box of reading tickets disappeared. Perhaps I didn't want to see them fall to ruins. Perhaps I wouldn't have been able to handle seeing their tiny paper fibers scattered to the wind. Perhaps, I'd still like to believe that somewhere up in the attic, there's an unpacked box. A box filled with gloomy forests and magic, dancing lights.