Bibliophobia

by Sarah Chihaya

I do remember this kind of childhood reading seeming safe and certain, but that safety was limited—sitting alone in my room, library books scattered in a ring around me like warding runes, I knew they could not keep me in blissful isolation for real, or forever. I think it’s the determined firmness with which I sealed myself inside the shelter of fiction that makes so many of the books I read at that time blur together. It almost didn’t matter what world I was retreating to inside any given book, as long as I could leave my body where it was, sitting in my bedroom with the door closed, shutting out the shouting or—sometimes worse—the cold, watchful silence radiating up the stairs, waiting to be broken. All those books thatched together to keep me insulated from everything outside the door. But I knew even then that the shelter they offered was small and fragile. A necessary illusion of safety.