By Jessy Wallach, TIWP Student

All readers are addicts chasing our initial high. No matter how much we read, no matter the story nor the genre, no book will ever match the wonders of our childhood tales. We forget now that it was not always a metaphor to say that stories are magic. Books came alive in our hands, they were a reality distinct for our own, but equally real; perhaps even more so, for they were all vivid colors and exciting adventures, free of the mundanity of everyday life. When I recall my early childhood, I don’t remember who my friends were, nor how I spent my free time. All I know is Narnia, the Graveyard Book, Five Kingdoms! I cannot tell you the name of my first grade teacher, but I can explain in detail how the Nome King dug a tunnel to Oz only to be defeated by a magic fountain. Time made no distinction between fiction and reality when selecting my core memories. Just as surely as my favorite characters stumbled from one realm to another, I was swept away into crevices within my mind I never knew existed. Back then, my brain was flexible, capable of holding countless universes in its folds. It shocks me now to return to these precious worlds and discover them to be only ink and paper, the magic bled free from the soft, well-worn pages. Like all readers, in that numbing quest to separate fact from fiction, my mind has grown cataracts. We read and read and read, and books linger and then fade, and while they linger they are mere phantoms of what they might have been. Yet still, we tear through book after book as if somewhere out there lies the one that will turn back the clock and reverse the damage time has wrought on our imaginations, and at last reunite us with those vanished worlds we once called home.