if Still I Love Read If I Were Blind
I’m sitting on the 6:45 commuter train, wedged between a man scrolling stock charts and a woman balancing a thermos of oatmeal on her knees. Everyone around me is staring at something glowing — a screen, a ticker, a game of Candy Crush that refuses to die. I’m the only one with a paperback book in my lap. The font is too small, the train too jittery, the morning too loud. But I keep reading. I’m doing something that feels almost rebellious.
And I start to wonder: if I were blind, would I still love reading?
Reading was never about the eyes alone. My first memory of books isn’t the printed page — it’s sound. My mother’s voice in the dark, low and warm, carrying fairy tales across the room like a boat on a river. Later, my father’s habit of mispronouncing the names of knights in Arthurian legends — on purpose, so I’d laugh and correct him. Reading was not ink and paper; it was performance, rhythm, texture.
Some days, I think I’ve been unusually lucky. Lucky to have parents who read out loud. Lucky to have a language rich enough to hold me. Lucky to live in a world where words are everywhere — in menus, in signs, in the half-legible handwriting of a stranger. I didn’t earn that luck; it was handed to me before I even knew how to hold a pencil.
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So if my vision disappeared tomorrow — if every letter blurred into darkness — what then?
The obvious answer is audiobooks. But it isn’t just about swapping eyes for ears. It’s about rediscovering what reading actually is. The silent rhythm of punctuation made loud again. The comma as breath, the period as a closing door. The paragraph as a swell of tide.
Maybe I would read slower. Maybe I would learn to read differently, to let language brush against me the way music does — not line by line, but as something that lingers in the body long after it’s heard. And maybe, blindness would make me more grateful for every syllable that reaches me, like a coin dropped in the jar of luck I’ve been carrying all my life.
Gratitude, I’ve realized, isn’t just for what we can still see. It’s for what continues to arrive even when vision is gone — the voice of a friend reading a poem out loud, the softness of a sentence spoken at the right time, the way a story keeps finding you no matter how many senses you lose.
Because I don’t love reading because I can see. I love reading because it reminds me that language is a door anyone can walk through. And if that door changes shape — if it becomes a voice in my ear instead of letters on a page — I’ll still walk through it.
Not out of habit. Not out of defiance. But out of gratitude — and the quiet luck of being alive in a world where words are still breathing.
