By Aarya Jha
There is a scent, ancient and aching,
Of stories long buried yet alive in decay—
Books whispering in voices of crumbling paper,
Ghosts inked in faded letters,
Their echoes weaving a maze in my mind.
I open their spines and step inside,
Into worlds that never existed yet feel more real
Than the air I breathe.
I have lived and died a thousand times—
A child in rags who spoke to wolves,
A queen with blood on her throne.
I have kissed lips that never knew my name,
And watched lovers crumble into ash.
Friends I once knew dissolve as pages turned,
Enemies vanished when the chapter closed.
Each life a fleeting tempest,
Each death a quiet goodbye.
I have wielded magic and forgotten its taste,
Traded wings for chains, freedom for power.
I’ve seen deserts bloom and empires fall,
Felt ice bite my skin and fire consume my veins.
A beggar one moment, a god the next—
The lines blur, the stories bleed,
Reality folds into fiction’s embrace.
In these pages, I am infinite,
And yet I am no one.
The smell of old books binds me,
An anchor and a flight.
They feed my soul,
Yet hollow it with longing—
For the lovers I’ll never meet,
For the dragons I’ll never tame,
For the children who lived only in my mind.
What are books, if not prisons gilded with dreams?
What is imagination, if not the cruelest freedom?
And so I keep turning,
Fingers stained with time,
Lost in worlds I can never touch—
For the stories own me now,
And I am theirs to burn.