When I was a kid, I was famous for walking through the halls of elementary school while reading. One foot in front of the other, nose in a book, quickly devouring the library. The librarians knew me by sight and struck up conversations over the bookshelves, handing me books and suggesting better ones.

This continued through most of my life, despite occasionally making poor choices — like the "Twilight" phase (it's a mix of endearment and embarrassment for me, right along the lines of listening to exclusively My Chemical Romance and Panic! At the Disco for a solid three years).

I was really into spending time in libraries and taking books off the shelves, whatever I could find, devouring them like snacks. Everything from Harry Potter to "Chicken Farming for Fun and Profit." This is how I learned about everything from cats (fun fact: almost all calico cats are female. How super rad is that? Genetics are awesome!) to palm reading to Catholic saints of the middle ages. I was a wealth of obscure Trivial Pursuit knowledge.

When I got into high school, I found myself with a lot less time to sit in the grass and read. I traded in my favorite books for "The Abridged Count of Monte Cristo," watched my to-read list grow and grow with only the summer left to cure it. Friends and teachers still saw how I lit up around paperbacks and frequently left them with me, small gifts and books lent over lunch. I read books I loved during classes I didn't like, still managed to work myself in to poetry and prose.

I found myself falling in love with language in a way I hadn't before. It was a comfortable love, the love of old friends, love like coming home. Rereading books I loved as a young teenager and a kid was like seeing friends I hadn't known for years, awkward at first and then slipping back into comfort -- I used to love books with the passion of bonfires, but now love then with the glow of a candle, bright enough to push back the darkness, but not devouring.

My parents say I was in love with books since I could reach out and touch them, asked to be read to every day and every night. Sometimes I wonder if my love of language was born with me, mixed into my genes like blonde hair and freckles, or if it was born through my family teaching me how to love it.

I think about being a girl who reads (a lot) in a world where there is so much at the click of a button -- both the dark corners of reddit and poetry written in the BC era. We read and write, scan listicles on Buzzfeed and read scathing articles about Donald Trump's hair, write texts and emails ... all day. This is the most reading and writing anyone's done for generations, I think, but wrapped up in a package of Gifs and pop-up ads. I often wonder what this means for reading and writing -- our lives, condensed into 120 characters or less.

Almost all my friends, lifelong, loved books like I did. We spent sleepovers gossiping about our favorite characters, theorizing about what happened after the books ended. We went to movie premiers based off books together, dog-eared paperbacks in hand, light from the projectors gleaming off our braces. We chanted the mantra of book-lovers everywhere: the book was better.

And it was. But it was because the book was woven in our hearts, ink and paper like flesh and blood.