“In order to write about life first you must live it.”

When we read the stories of others in their physical form, the movement through the text captures our own lived experiences. Pages and time marked by the drops of watermelon juice from the bustling yet quaint Bangkok cafe; the salty tears and ocean spray stain the necessary passages and tides we’re meant to return to; boarding passes from bygone trips—fleeting escapes—that serve as bookmarks not only for pages, but for memories; the almost-dissipated smell of Turkish kebabs caught in the fibers transports us back to that wonderfully chaotic bazaar; the smudge of dirt from who knows where while we were doing who knows what forever underlines the title.

Neon highlights stretch unevenly across the text while our handwritten notes crowd the margins, exploring thoughts, feelings, and ideas we may act on — or never think of again. The mere act of transferring those ideas from our minds onto the physical pages of the stories that call to us is enough to anchor them, even if only subconsciously, into our daily actions and routines.

Our lives, like the pages, flip forward without hesitation, but the experiences that shape them remain. Like the impossibly velvety-fine sand from the beaches of San Juan, or the torn edge that sparks the faint callback to a sudden gust of cold Icelandic wind, they are forever pressed between the pages of a story that, somewhere along the way, became our own.