To the child reading a book

Catalogue of delights: 6

Sitting across from me is a child with a book in hand. This sort of thing fills me with an unreasonable amount of hope for the world. She’s engrossed by the colors and a sea of static faces, as if in rebellion against the digital ocean designed to captivate us more than the ocean itself. We are drowning in the currents of the former, without any sense of beauty and movement from the latter. Fully garbed in pink, she’s delighting in showing her mother and her mother’s friend the simple happenings that populate the pages. The words are animating her young mind and soul. Her voice has filled the entirety of the café, as she bounces between being herself and the seeming fictions. The line between the two is fuzzier than we think. I don’t want to moralize, but I feel that the parents are doing something right. I see it in the ease of the child’s laugh, the joy that spreads across her lips as she plays in the ocean of her imagination. It’s thanks to her that I feel my younger self has been freed to dive aimlessly into The Mountain in the Sea, to meander in a world inspired by our own.