My model is myself
For as long as I can remember, I have always loved books. As a child, I enjoyed my parents giving me storybooks and reading them or having them read to me in the evenings. While my sisters would get excited if they were given toys or clothes, I was very happy if they also gave me books:
Nancy is strange because she likes to read, the other children would say, and I felt good about being different.
Books for me became not only the perfect companion, but also the door I could open and use to escape from this world and enter other, more interesting worlds. Knowing that this door existed made me much more different: when you talk about other worlds and about some characters as if they were your friends, our words can be proof enough to be called crazy.
When I grew up it was no different: my fascination for books grew and although I have a profession where reading is mandatory, for me reading became a pleasure, a passion. Unfortunately, my parents did not have a library, so I had to borrow many books, photocopy others, go to city libraries and even steal books from doctors' offices.
So you can imagine my pleasure, my pride, my joy when I was acquiring each book and building my own library, the one that speaks of me, of my interests, of who I am:
_Have you read all those books? -people ask me as if it were abnormal to read.
I remember that in the past, when I had the chance to travel, I would arrive in a new city and among the places I liked to visit were the bookstores and used book auctions. I would laugh and jump like a child with a new toy when I found a book I had been looking for for a long time or a book by a writer that had fascinated me. Because yes, I am also one of those who obsesses over authors and wants to read everything by them.
So from any trip, I would arrive home with a suitcase full of books:
You don't get tired of reading? - my parents would ask me, as if reading was like running or dancing.
Even nowadays, when people prefer to read through the screen of their cell phones or laptops, I prefer the physical book, to turn and smell its pages, to underline what I like. Because I am one of those people who make the book their own and put comments next to the paragraph or at the foot of the page as if I were in dialogue with the author. I love to highlight with dashes or exclamation marks that sentence that impressed me and that I would like to remember or tattoo in my soul.
In short, sitting in a square and taking out a book, standing in a queue and entertaining myself by reading or going to the beach, and between the suntan lotion and the knick-knacks, carrying my book, may be one of the most extravagant things I can do. Reading, having books, is for weirdos. People see me in a strange, abnormal way, as if I were an antique object, as if I were wearing a mask or worse: as if I were naked. And to be honest, I like to be out of tune with the world....
The images are from my personal gallery and the text was translated with Deepl
