Aurora 2025 with cover

Kaitlyn Carpenter

You’re Reading This… Aren’t You

You’re reading this. Why wouldn’t you? You picked up the magazine, after all, and the words are already spilling onto the page. But here’s the thing: you didn’t expect to be here, did you? Not really. You thought it’d be something else, something familiar. Maybe a floral-filled sonnet or a baffling buzzword ballad, but not this. So go ahead. Keep reading. Let’s see where it takes you. I see you reading this. Maybe you picked it up out of curiosity... or mockery. It’s easy to mock, isn’t it? People tend to avoid reading these days, too busy swiping and scrolling to sit still with a page. The words are too much, or maybe not enough—too slow, too heavy. A little girl was similar to you once. Except it wasn’t a phone she devoted her attention to, but Luigi’s Mansion and Zelda: Wind Waker. She too was behind. The pages in front of her might as well have been in a foreign language—one she was supposed to understand but couldn’t quite decode. She could hear the other kids laughing, moving on, but she was stuck. The letters jumble, the words twist, and no matter how hard she tried, the story wouldn’t make sense. She didn’t hate reading, not exactly. But sometimes, it felt like it was the one thing she’d never get right. With tempered sighs, she was forced to sit and read for the first time. Harry Potter, it was called.

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