There was a year of my life when I spent most of my days in bed.

I had no energy to get up. Days passed in that strange, shapeless way they do when you aren't quite living them. I read the same book again and again—The Blind Assassin. I returned to it with the desperation of someone returning to a place where nobody asked questions.

There was something fucking liberating about being in Sakiel-Norn.

An imaginary planet, with its twin suns and its strange civilizations and its stories nested inside stories. I could disappear there. Not dramatically. Not even consciously. I simply had somewhere else to be.

I often wonder now who I identified with when I read the book.

Laura or Iris?

I don't know.

Perhaps that was the point.

Maybe some part of me wanted to be Laura—the girl who seemed too strange for the world she had been given, who could never quite learn the rules everyone else seemed to understand.

And perhaps another part of me was Iris, looking backwards, trying to make a story out of a life that had already happened.

Or maybe, that year, I was simply someone lying in bed, turning the same pages over and over, grateful for the liberty of leaving this planet for a while.

I still don't know whether I was reading the book, or whether the book was giving me somewhere to hide.

The strange thing is, I still go back to it whenever I feel something.

Happiness. Anger. Hope. Sadness. Whatever it is.

I know how mad that sounds, dear reader.

But it is a fact.

I have read that book more than I have read my Bible.

I have recited the line—

She imagines him imagining her, this is her salvation.

—a thousand times.

I have annotated the text. I have wondered what would have happened if Alex Thomas hadn't disappeared. I have hated Iris's husband. I have felt sorry for Laura. I have lived inside the attic of Xamadu enough times to almost believe I know the way around. I have been the keeper of Iris's secret.

Perhaps that is what the book gave me.

Not an escape, exactly.

A place where all the things I felt could exist without needing to be explained.

And maybe that is why I keep returning to it.

Because I feel deeply.

Yes.

I feel deeply.

Dear reader, let me confess.

I feel things deeply. I just never show it.

It hurts me when someone makes a funny comment about my nose. It makes me want to cry when I get an answer wrong in a practice test. I gulp everything down until it reaches my throat.

I act like I am invincible, indestructible, untouchable.

That's my blessing and my curse.

I can laugh when I want to cry.

I can shrug when something hurts.

I can pretend nothing has reached me at all.

And you know what I'm afraid of?

Uselessness.

The fear that I am a useless thing.

A useless daughter.

A useless sister.

A useless friend.

And now—

a useless aspirant.

A useless dreamer.

Perhaps that's why failure hurts me more than it should.

Perhaps that's why a wrong answer on a practice test can feel, for a few terrible seconds, like evidence against my entire existence.

I know how irrational that sounds.

But feelings have never been particularly interested in being rational.

Maybe that's why I return to Sakiel-Norn.

Because there, nobody asks me to prove my usefulness.

Nobody asks me what I've achieved.

Nobody asks me whether I've become the person I was supposed to become.

I can simply exist.

And for a girl who has spent so much of her life trying to convince herself that she is worth something—

perhaps that is its own kind of salvation.

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