The Kind of Rabbit Hole You Don't Mind Falling Into

It started with one chapter. It was supposed to be one chapter, I had every intention of being asleep by eleven. And then somewhere around page sixty I looked up and my room was completely dark except for the nightstand lamp and my phone said 1:14am and I had that specific feeling of having been somewhere else entirely for the last two hours.

The book is 'The Glass Castle' by Jeannette Walls. I know, I'm late to it, everyone read it years ago, I've had approximately four people tell me I'd love it and I kept nodding and not picking it up. And then I found it at the library sale for fifty cents last weekend and ran out of excuses. I'm not even done yet and I already understand what everyone was talking about. There's something about the way she writes her own childhood that makes you feel like you're remembering it alongside her, even though nothing about her life resembles anything about mine. I don't know how that works. I've been thinking about it.

somewhere between the last paragraph and my own brain rn

The rabbit hole part, because there was a rabbit hole, was that I got to a section about a specific place, looked it up to see if it was real, and then spent forty minutes reading about it from a completely different angle than the book gives you. Which then led somewhere else. Which led somewhere else. This is why the internet exists and also why I should not be trusted with the internet after 10pm. I've been doing this more lately, I think. Reading something and immediately needing to know everything adjacent to it. The Creative Writing class probably has something to do with it, you start noticing how writers make choices about what to include and what to leave out, and suddenly you're chasing the omissions.

Anyway. It's Mother's Day weekend and I have things to do that are not staying up until 1am on a Thursday. But I don't regret it. The best rabbit holes never feel like a waste of time, even when they technically are.