Dear Bibliophile Ally,
Yeah, that's you. The nerdy girl with braces, hugging one book close to her face while another rests on her lap, eyes rapidly flicking across the pages with a steady intensity. The girl who could (and would) explain the plots of all three books she was reading at once in detail, whether you wanted to hear or not. The girl who just couldn't pick a favorite class because she loved them all. The cliché image of the unassuming bookworm girl was your whole persona; my whole persona, at least, it used to be.
Somewhere in between traveling about an hour to meet my current favorite author in a handmade shirt (S.E. Hinton, author of The Outsiders, one of my all time favorite books) and right now, the end of senior year of high school, I lost you.
Your literary, nerdy persona faded without me ever pausing to acknowledge it or realize why. Now, however, I see it. I don't know why you're gone or why you left, but I want you back.
You used to get lost in books, finding yourself engrossed in characters’ lives, enamored with the beauty of words, clamoring for five more minutes of time to read in between classes. You once spent an entire summer trying to get to triple digits in the number of books you had read (spoiler: you did it). I know now that even though on the surface it was so you could enter over 100 times into a local library’s reading contest (spoiler: you lost), it was really because you wanted to prove something to yourself. You used to beg and plead for just one more book in Barnes and Noble because you knew the five you were already holding would be done in the next few weeks. I laugh now every time I explain to somebody that you chose to write a ten page paper on global warming in fifth grade while other students presented experiments like a baking soda volcano.
It would be easy to say that public high school, in its flawed American educational system way, killed you, my former self, ridding me of your passion for reading and writing. It's just too stressful; they don't allow for creativity in English classes; the work is overwhelming and all-consuming; you would never sleep if you wanted time to read simply for pleasure. I don't think this is necessarily true, though. Sure, it is part of the problem. When I have picked up a book in the last four years, there's that voice in the back of my head whispering You could be doing homework or studying or relaxing or sleeping. It always seems now that there is a better way to use my time than reading. After all, reading doesn't go on your resume.
Maybe it's because I'm more lazy. Maybe it's because I'm more social now. I own a car and can choose to be out with friends at really any point of the day. Middle school Ally didn't have the luxury of this option; maybe she read so much because she couldn't leave home and do something else on a whim. Maybe I've just changed. Maybe getting lost in the wonders of a book just isn't as exciting as it used to be, maybe Netflix is the new reading for me.
There's no concrete reason as to why nerdy Ally left. But now that I know she's gone, really gone and has been for a while, I want her back.
So here I am, writing for an online newspaper in the back of class in all of my nerdy glory.
See you soon,
(hopefully)
Ally
