Reading

Since I can remember I spent my time with Summer. Football ( The English kind, not the American kind... What? They had the name first. We just appropriated it.) Tag, Hide and Go Seek. Anything really. In fact there was this one time when we were playing dodgeball with a few other kids, she said use the ball. There were two. So I picked up a basketball and threw it at her. She bounced it off her hand and it broke her finger. Of course I had to pay her back so she had me turning pages for her to read aloud for the next month. Charlotte's Web. I cried at the ending. (What? I was young and imaginative... According to Summer anyway...)

She taught me to read properly when my parents were out working. Doing something or other. They worked in a pharmaceutical company so they didn't have much time for me. They were either talking to doctors and selling drugs, or talking to the company and looking at what drugs they had to sell. I was pretty young really, and I missed them. But you know that thing about gifts not making up for bad parenting? They worked out pretty well with me.

When I was younger, I struggled with reading. So she put it upon herself teach me. She would bring in a book, set it down on my lap and say "Read." If I ever got somewhere that was difficult to pronounce, or I couldn't understand, then she'd spell out the sounds like she had been taught the same way. It... I suppose she was kind of an older sister to me.

You know what happens when you learn to read? You learn to write. I did as well. Poetry I guess was my thing when I was younger. But now I don't do it anymore. If circumstances were different... Maybe I'd have made something of myself. Somehow made it as a ghostwriter or something.

Actually that's doubtful. Very doubtful even, but I can dream.

Nowadays she rests her head on my lap, she asks me to read to her as I run my fingers through her long blonde hair. Jane Austen, John Buchan, J.K Rowling... if it's beautiful or exciting she'll let me read it. She says she loves the imagery in my voice. Sometimes, when I read to her, it's like I'm visualizing the places. The Thirty-Nine Steps of the novel, the sea, waxing and waning of waves, or the buzzing of the plane engine as it flies overhead.

Sometimes I realize I've lost myself so much in this book, reading, that I'm late for work.

I don't regret a second of it really.

I'm sure most of you know this. You do what you have to do to make your girlfriend happy.