I like reading in the tub. Is that bad? Lots of people say they enjoy wrapping up in a blanket while they read, and to me, the bathwater has a similar effect. I usually don’t have to worry about ruining the book if I drop it on the blanket, though. Either way, you do lose your place. I know everyone has that same inner panic whenever those pages come together without a bookmark or the slightest recollection as to a page number. But we always find it, don’t we?
I took the book I was reading last night and flipped it around. I bent it backwards, irresponsibly putting excessive strain on the spine. I’ll bet if you got quiet and listened close enough, you could hear a librarian crying.
I could see my reflection in the worn and grubby cellophane-like material that covered the book’s jacket. The cover was blue. It gave my face and everything around it a blue tint--a painful cliché, or rather an appropriate metaphor, that elicited a cynical laugh from me. While my brain was in analogy mode, I noticed how the plastic behaved when I made the slightest movement with the book. My face contorted, expanded, and contracted on the surface of the cover as if I were in a house of mirrors. Warped, like the view I have of myself. I tried to make one big concave dip so my face would disappear. If only it were that easy.
No, I don’t want my life to disappear, though I have been down that road before. But I’m talking about my view of myself. That warped, lying, misconstrued, “blue”-colored judgment that has me turning for solace to anything from the temporary to the unhealthy to the downright shameful. It’s such a powerful thing that seems like truth, and the only truth that will ever be true—that powerful. Perception is reality, indeed. We’d like to think we would, or should, know better (myself most definitely included), but when you’re in it and it’s in front of you, there’s no seeing outside the box.
Our eyes are very small. Even the biggest eyes are not much more than an inch at their widest dimension. Being in the right position, like a mountaintop, we can see for miles in any direction. But if we want to block our vision, the thing we use to block it, like a blindfold, doesn’t have to be that big to prevent sight. Funny how a vast horizon and majestic miles of scenery can’t penetrate a millimeter of fabric covering our eyes.