Books.
That is the easy answer.
The truer answer is escape.
Not escape in the weak sense. Not running away because I could not face the world. More like finding a door where no one else had thought to put one. A door hidden in paper. A door stitched into panels of color and speech bubbles, into capes and impossible cities, into heroes who were wounded but still stood up when the moment demanded it.
I started with comic books.
They were bright, loud, impossible things. Men and women dressed like thunder. World’s ending every few pages. Cities held together by courage, guilt, grief, and the stubborn belief that somebody still had to do the right thing, even when doing the right thing cost them something.
I did not know it then, but I was studying.
I was learning pacing.
I was learning myth.
I was learning how pain could be given shape without being named too plainly.
Then came fantasy.
Kingdoms. Forests. Chosen ones. Old magic buried beneath ordinary soil. A sword pulled from silence. A child discovering that the world was larger, stranger, and more dangerous than anyone had warned them. Fantasy taught me that reality was not always the deepest truth. Sometimes a dragon was not just a dragon. Sometimes it was fear. Sometimes it was inheritance. Sometimes it was the thing waiting at the edge of childhood, breathing smoke.
Then came science fiction.
Stars. Machines. Strange planets. Futures built from the anxieties of the present. Science fiction taught me that imagination could ask hard questions without raising its voice. What makes us human? What do we owe one another? What happens when progress outruns wisdom? What happens when we build new worlds and carry the same old wounds into them?
I read anything I could get my hands on.
Anything.
There was hunger in it.
Not the kind that complains. The kind that searches cabinets when no one is looking. The kind that learns to make a meal out of whatever is available. I consumed stories that way. Greedy, grateful, half-starved for elsewhere.
And sometimes, when the book was right, when the room was quiet enough, when the world had loosened its grip on me for a little while, I stopped reading.
I was there.
I could see it.
The dust on the road. The flicker of torchlight. The broken starship wall humming in the dark. The hero’s hand trembling before the final choice. The old mentor already knowing the cost. The enemy not entirely wrong. The child standing at the edge of becoming, afraid to step forward and more afraid not to.
That was the magic.
Not that books showed me other worlds.
But that they made me feel as if I had survived them.
Now I do not read as much about the world’s other people as I used to. Not because I love them less. Maybe because some part of me finally understood what all that reading had been preparing me for.
I was not only visiting.
I was apprenticing.
Every comic book, every fantasy kingdom, every distant planet was placing a tool in my hand. Teaching me how to build. Teaching me how to listen. Teaching me that a world is not made only of maps and names and invented histories.
A world is made of longing.
A world is made of rules and wounds.
A world is made of what people fear, what they worship, what they hide, what they carry, and what they are willing to lose.
These days, I am trying to create my own.
Not because I have forgotten the ones that raised me.
Because I remember them.
Because I owe them.
Because somewhere there may be another child sitting in a room too hot in summer, too cold in winter, holding a book like it is a secret passage out of the life they have been handed.
And maybe one day, if I do this right, they will open something I made.
And for a little while, they will not simply be reading.
They will be there.
Kyle J. Hayes
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