a gloomy spring day

Reading calms me down. I knew how to read pretty early. Ok, I know you wouldn't believe it, but what I'm gonna tell now can't be more true. So when I was like 4 or 5, generally speaking I was still in kindergarten, one day, my mom took me to nhà sách Phi Vũ (hahaha, that bookstore has been there for more than 10 years, this is freakin ridiculous right?) because I had been insisting on her. Maybe I was fed up with toys that day, I picked out a book after looking carefully at those high shelves. You know, the kind of super thin books that couldn't be thinner with lots of pictures and only a line or two each page. The theme color was yellow and the book was about a duck. That's all I can recall, but the moment I opened the book when I got home, all those lines of words suddenly made perfect sense to me. At that time, I was only taught to read and write single letters and syllables. Before I learned the story of the duck, words are still a mystery to me. This doesn't sound very convincing but that's why I never spent a night practicing reading paragraphs when I was in first grade. Hahaha, at least my life has some shining point.

And reading brings sound to my quite quiet current life. At those late nights stretching myself on the sofa holding a book before bedtime, I really thought to myself "I do like to read". Unlike my juvenile years in which I bought tons of mangas, I don't read too much now. Several pages a day. During Art History class. While waiting for the Calc professor to come. After brushing my teeth for bed. On a lazy weekend afternoon. Enough to keep the surface of my life unflat but having something up and down.

Thursday night right before spring break, the temperature has dropped itself down to 39 F, I am covering myself with a blanket, putting my feet up on the chair, asking Dương if her dog is dead and if she is sad. Apart from the humming the refrigerator, it is utterly silent. I'm the only that's breathing in this apartment. It is so weird to think that way. Sometimes I'm alone and I don't feel lonely. Sometimes I am not alone and I am lonely. And sometimes I am alone and I am lonely. I've got used to it anyway, don't worry. Trust me.

There are people who can fit themselves in anywhere and there are people who can't find themselves anywhere but home. When I was younger, I thought I was the first kind. But I never was.

I don't sleep good these days. Only shallow and dreamy sleeps come to find me.