Dahlia Michilena
Professor Hoehne
Fairy Tales and Rewritings
12 September 2019
A Book to Remember
Six hours before my flight and I am almost finished packing for my trip to Cuba, crossing almost everything off my mental checklist except a book – any random book whose back-cover synopsis even slightly piqued my interest. For the past ten years, I have never cracked open the various books that I had brought with me on my many family vacations and trips alike; however, it was always essential when it came to packing. Nonetheless, at the very moment, I could not decide which book would never see the light of the Cuban sun, or at least the light of the lamp at my Air B&B. Finally, I decided to bring the bottom-of-my-bag favorite, The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini with its cover and page edges worn, not by any means done due to my reading of it.
After my family and I landed in Cuba, I walked off the three-and-a-half-hour plane ride, recovering from the tear-jerking romance movies I watched throughout the flight. After a day of exploring the city of Havana, buying souvenirs, and taking pictures – the only thing I was able to use my phone for throughout the trip – we returned to our Air B&B and withdrew to our rooms. Unable to go to sleep, instinctually, I reached for my phone and attempted to scroll through social media. However, to my dismay, the small letters at the top left corner of my phone quickly reminded me that I did not have any signal.
After several hours of trying to put myself to sleep, I glanced around the room looking for anything that might entertain me until, finally, my eyes landed on my black book bag, imagining the book I had brought, squished at the bottom of the bag. I dug for the book and studied the cover for about two minutes before I reluctantly decided to begin reading. I continued with each word, sentence, and paragraph until sleep completely enveloped me and I woke up with The Kite Runner next to me. Every free moment I had, I returned to the challenging lives of Amir and Hassan within the book, feeling mixtures of anxiousness, worry, and relief for these characters during every short taxi ride or late night in my room.
This continued until the very end of my trip, as my siblings and I began to board our fight back home. This time, rather than occupy myself with the latest movies on the flight monitors, I chose to read more of Hosseini’s words. At one point, I felt so overcome with sadness for his fictional characters, that I found myself tearing up in my isle seat, and on that flight back home I finished The Kite Runner.
Sometime throughout my childhood, I forgot the importance of reading. Maybe I have never actually known that it was important – I just saw it as something that interested me. Over time, reading became less and less of a hobby and more of a task as my interest veered onto other entertainment such as my phone and computer. This trip reminded me that happiness, sadness, confusion, anger, and many other emotions are not only felt through videos or pictures that I can find scrolling through my feed. In fact, the words of an amazing author can bring those same emotions forward three-fold. Even in the rare moment throughout this trip, when I was not reading, talking with my family, or dancing salsa to the music played by Cuban bands on the street, I was able to bask in the beauty around me. The picture and feeling that is ingrained in my memory of the moon, stars, and sunsets in Cuba does not compare to what little technology can offer.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
