I'm not sure I'm reading enough. I feel like I'm not quite reaching some unofficial quota, something I set when I was much too little to know that other people's words on yellowed pages would be the last of my solace on the worst of my days. I've been reading a book that I love for the past three months, maybe more or maybe less but it's all that time anyway and it's driving me crazy because I can't find it in me to pick it up and to read and to feel. This one, it's sad, it's oh so sad but I'm not sure most people would pick it up that way. But that's just it, right down to the bone. A man crossing a wire, quite literally and a woman having lost her son - what little else is there when other emotions are just too strong? When I was little, I read every book in the library in my school by the time I had been there just four years. I had four years left, but I devoured every last page and they called me a genius because I scored second highest in an exam that the whole country took. Pride or nothing, second always plagued me even though I was never all that much for competition. They let me get trapped inside my own head, even back then. They allowed me to sit with myself after I had done what they had asked while the others struggled onwards and they allowed me to feel special and unusual and just plain different, but I liked it. I was too young to know what pride was, but I was proud. I was better in a way that the others could never even begin to comprehend. My brother didn't really have the smarts - or at least he pretended he didn't. He didn't do so well academically and I've been wondering lately why he was targeted with harsh words and violence. Children can be so cruel. I understand why I got it, but him, I'll never understand. He's doing much better at life and living than I am, than I ever have. He hasn't got a job and he still lives at home with my parents and me but he's well adjusted in a sense that I can't quite seem to grasp. Sometimes I forget that he had problems too, with anger mostly, but he seems happier now. Different, but not in a bad way at all. Once, not so long after I tried to kill myself, I was sat on my bed in the middle of the night and I found his then girlfriend outside my window frantically trying to get my attention without waking my parents because he'd said some worrisome things and disappeared, and so we all ended up looking for him, me, his girlfriend, his friends and my parents and it struck me how loved he was, and how scared he was too. He answered his phone but wouldn't talk and I told him that if he was having problems just like me, I told him that I'd look out for him as best I could, just as he always had for me. He came home too, unharmed and nobody ever really found out what happened, but the fact of the matter was that he was okay physically and at least that was a start. I delved into books after that, yet again.