There I was, sitting in my class as per usual, I couldn’t tell you when it was or who’s class I was even in, being too invested in my Instagram reels to pay attention to anything around me, when suddenly his gracious voice had blessed my ears.
Using new state of the art technology, Dr B’s visage appeared before my eyes, completely overriding anything on my phone screen, breaking me from the trance that short form video content had put me under. Without words his expression spoke to me, striking me deep in my soul, telling me to cease this brain melting waste of my time and to do the unthinkable…to read a book.
The concept of it perplexed me, a book? in the 21st century? Darting my eyes from my phone to my desk to my backpack, I had remembered something once lost to me, a small object that had been long exiled to the darkest corners of my bag. The object was nothing but a shadow of rectangular proportion, reaching my hand into the darkness my hand made contact with its folded corners. I grabbed it and placed it in front of me, the oddly bound stack of paper designed to fit into my hand felt ancient, foreign, unknown, frightening, blood-curdling, horrific, and worst of all it felt educational.
Taking a moment to gather the last of my courage that the object’s appearance had not taken from me, I began my grand undertaking on a task I deemed impossible, I started to read the book.
20 minutes had passed since I opened the cover, then 30, then 40, dusty gears within my mind had begun to turn once more as I felt my brain operating at a level that I hadn’t thought was possible, I was forming my own thoughts, drawing my own connections, relating all I had seen and done to the text in front of me, even dissecting the words beyond their face value. Before I had realized it, I was done with the book, closing the final page and taking in my surroundings for the first time in hours, I noticed I was sitting in that classroom long after school had ended. Handprints painted my arms and the tiles of the floor beneath me had cracked, my commitment had bound me to this desk, my hands to the pages, my entire being resisting any attempt to pull me from the pages.
As I gaze out of this classroom window, at the burning sunset, I see now the world beyond the horizon. The sky no longer acts as a barrier of my sight but a deep sea in which I pour my consciousness, the wonder of the world’s vastness had encapsulated me in a childlike curiosity, all images that my eyes once perceived are now processed with something greater than sight could manage. Dr B had saved me from the confinement my phone has kept me under.
