Super rough draft of For the book nerds

Fellow book nerds:

We breathe stories like oxygen, 

letting them take root in our hearts
and spread into our world like wildfire

We hear the call of the wild from the pages of a worn paperback,

We understand the power of myth

We stare into the eyes of the world and see our own narrative

We jump into words

and let magic fill our veins.

Dear readers, we understand how worlds are created.

We let stories live in the spaces of our minds

we grow Halloween trees in our brains and

search the skies for moving castles 

we steal kisses from Kafka

and taste stardust and the absolute absurdity of everything

We know that every love story is a ghost story

because we live in the best of times and the worst of times,

drinking bathtub gin,

and smiling because we understand that a hero ain't nothin' but a sandwich.

We vacation in Narnia and Lusitania,

and we love Jo but goddamn is "Albus Severus" a stupid name.

We are friends of elves and cacticae and hobbits and dragons,

We find truth in pages and understand how words can change lives
how language is alive 
We follow words down the rabbit hole that is empathy 
and

We have lived Bukowski's low life

danced in Gaiman's Neverwhere,

and we know fear

know loathing

know Las Vegas

We got through Wuthering Heights twice before realizing that we hated it, 

and we've spent many a day wondering exactly what combination of drugs we'd have to take to get on Lewis Caroll's level

Falling in love with our tell-tale hearts

we embrace stories like old friends

and inhale the perfume of binding glue and parchment like the scent of a lover

worshiping in library cathedrals,
we know that books are not just paper and ink but containers for ideas and change
we read fairy tales to our children because we know that things could be otherwise
we read because we know that to value imagination is to value our humanity
we read because in language there is freedom