One day after school, my parents sat me down and demanded that I get my head out of those darn books. Lifting my eyes ever so slightly above the rim of The Giver, I was shocked to come face-to-face with a world I had never seen before. In front of me: a rainbow. Behind me: a double rainbow. To my side: a crazy person taking a shit on someone’s porch. The smell of fresh feces wafted towards my nose that was no longer buried in a work of great literature. I couldn’t believe my eyes—mostly because they were watering too much from the smell. My parents were right. The real world was beautiful.

From that day forward, I vowed to never again read a book and to start living life the way G-d intended: illiterate. I learned that paper wasn’t just a place for the great minds of our generation to share their most sophisticated beliefs, morals, and ideas; it could also be folded up into a tiny crane.

Ink, the blood of poets that would spill out onto the page in an obsessive attempt at conveying their artistic viewpoint was much more fun when paired with water and a dollar-store t-shirt to make something my fellow peers deemed “tie-dye.”

I worked to forget everything I had ever learned from a book so that I could focus on what was right in front of me: the movie version of every book I had ever read. I don’t know why I had pictured every literary character as ugly, but I enjoyed much more watching hot people act out the scenes that I had poured over in the middle of the night with nothing more than a flashlight to guide my eyes.

I soon grew bored of the real world, but I knew I could never go back to books because I had vowed not to. That’s when I took up performative reading, and the attention I got from girls on the subway was enough to keep me entertained.