This feeling

Have you ever had this feeling when you realize one day you're wasting away sitting here, while the Earth revolves around the sun - minutes, hours, days, months go by - still nothing ever changed but a lot did in so many ways?

Have you ever had this overwhelming lust for the world around you? To watch the stars, the sunset, the waves? To hear your own voice and his weaving through the wind as you drive away? To feel weightless, to feel gravity? To taste his mouth, his skin and the flavors of the world?

Have you ever felt so carefree and unburdened that you lost the sense of it all?

Have you ever woken up to a day just like any other, and feel limited, caged, rooted, that you just want to shout from the top of your lungs until you're out of breath?

Have you ever just wanted to do something, anything, everything, but... you never took the first step?

Have you ever had this feeling in the pit of your stomach because you can’t find the answers, you’re not sure where you are, but somehow you know, one day, you’re gonna get there, wherever you’re supposed to be?

Guilty pleasure

Oh no. What have I done.

I looked down. At the pen and paper in my hands.

Yet another list of book titles drawled out in my lazy script. Dozens of titles and authors lined up in pieces of paper. No, nothing harmless about that.

Where are the other lists? Lost in my black hole of a bag, lost in the folds of my notebook, lost in the depths of my over-thinking mind.

It's a mannerism, a coping mechanism, above all, a guilty pleasure.

The OCD in me is itching to tick off one book after the other because... that's what lists are for! I cross out one, two if I'm lucky, but never did I follow through.

But my carefree spirit says otherwise and tells me to just give in to my bibliophilic instincts. Let it take over me and, without so much as a second glance, I will know which trove is destined for me.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I feel like a hopeless case. All I have are endless titles and names rather than pulpy paperbacks. I'm swimming around in an ocean of lists.

Sometimes I think I'm more frustrated with the fact that I can't have all the books I want soon enough.

In the words of Matthew J. Bruccoli, scholar and F. Scott Fitzgerald biographer : "You don't buy books as an investment. You buy them because it gives you pleasure to read them, to touch them... to see them on shelves."

Is there anyone out there who feels the same way?