In the sheer silence of the library, I’m often overtaken with this rush of feeling to hug people I see studying. Not people I know. Not people I’ve met. Not even people who are aware of themselves. No, I feel like wrapping my arms around people who are focused in a book, so lost in what they’re doing, that I can see, I can feel that there’s something surrounding them, that’s taken them away from where they are. I want to feel their warmth, that warmth that comes from a place, removed from here, a warmth coming from the pages of a world only they can read.

They remind me of preening birds. No, they remind me most of kids at Golestan Preschool. Those five year olds in my class who held pens and lost themselves in the blank page, so lost that what came out of the pen was not ink, but parts of themselves. They were in that pen, and they’d built a world around themselves that I couldn’t see, but that they’d try so hard to explain:

“We’re on a train, See! I’m riding a lion!” he’d say, after the bubble of imagination snapped, and he’d come to, and I wished I wasn’t there so that he could stay there, so that he wouldn’t feel the need to come back.

They come so rarely--times when adults look and act like a kids, unaware, consumed by a place they’ve created.