The beauty of words

They open the book and see the first word, and like a stream of two-dimensional characters, the story comes to life in one long reel, the words tick-tick-ticking along like a steady stream of subtitles below a paper-doll-like chain of actions. And the pictures, in faded color and shades of gray, move jerkily forward, dragging their reader alongside like an unfortunate packhorse tied to a slowly moving wagon.

But I can see the page. Over their shoulder, I can see the words they're reading, with their forehead scrunched in concentration, their lips almost moving as they dwell, torturously, on each word, almost as if they're pronouncing it, rolling it around in their mouth before letting it go, concentrating on each noun and verb and preposition so hard that the meaning is painfully squeezed out of it like juice from a lemon, splattering them in the face and dripping stickily to the floor.

I can see those words, but as I look, craning my neck, they seem to leap from the page, spinning round and round like a vortex opening to swallow me whole. I see the letters leap from the dull, white pages and rearrange themselves, forming themselves into a story, a three-dimensional picture as rich and colorful as a movie, but surrounding me, covering me from head to toe in a shimmer of meaning.

My surroundings fade to gray as I tumble headlong into the story. No longer do the words march slowly on like apples on a conveyor belt, but instead they leap forward, triggering action and movement and color and sound, all around me, and suddenly I am no longer an observer, but a player, as the story unfolds around me. I jump as I hear the thunderclaps, and my eyes fill with tears as the heroine lays her sister to rest in the cold, frozen earth. The mountains tower above me, and I emerge from the bus, blinking in the summer light, searching for the man in the white top hat. I speed through the night, devouring the words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, turning page after page as the train speeds toward the twisted break in the track, my heart filled with terror for the passengers trapped on board. And when the words hold me back, I free myself from the words, my eyes searching only for the continuation of the story, leaving the articles and the prepositions and even some of the nouns behind. I thirst for meaning, and when the story finally reaches its climax and winds to a close, my heart pounds more slowly, my breathing quiets, and my hands tremble as I turn the last pages of the story, which finally releases me from the spell, and I blink in mild surprise to see my nondescript surroundings. The book lays innocently on my lap, the adventure bound quietly between the two stiff covers, waiting for me to come back, to once again venture between its pages, where lies an infinite realm of possibilities.