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BERKELEY'S NEWS • NOVEMBER 19, 2023

A love letter to fiction

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SOMA CHU | STAFF

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FEBRUARY 26, 2023

I come to you with a busy mind, chaos that yearns for harmony.
I crack you open, your insides laid bare — there I find comfort,
An escape.
You are ink,
you are the contents of a mind,
you are a thousand different configurations of the same twenty-six letters you are-
Fictional.
Is it so very wrong to prefer this blissful ignorance for just one moment? A time of suspended belief?
Voices that only I can hear caress my brain, speak secrets to my heart, emotions I cannot express.
You belong to this world — yet simultaneously, you belong to me.
Only me. Only my mind. My imagination.
You are a remedy to despair,
A remedy to the illness that is reality.
You tell your secrets to me, me only.
And I listen.
There is a love so pure between a book and its reader. It is a beautiful thing for a mind to fall in love with another’s.
It is a bond of shared tears, where the very real tears stain the pages like blood and the laughs build with very real elation at nothing more than ink and paper.
You fall in love with their deepest thoughts, their words, their soul.
They exist nowhere but in the mind and on paper. Within the safety of a cover and a spine.
You are peace.
You are the magic of the pen,
the confessions of a soul broken and mended alike,
a hand to hold,
company to keep,
a precious bond that cannot be broken, you are-
Real to me.

Contact Zainab Adam at 

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FEBRUARY 26, 2023