Time traveler in Cheaper than Therapy

It’s weird picking up this book here. It’s almost as if between the soft recycled papers, sprinkled among the small ink-printed words, there is a magic that wafts up from the turning of pages that transports me into a simpler time that I didn’t appreciate at its true capacity. I relive these moments- so real that they seem palpable. I want to touch them, to hold them, to savor them. But they slip through my fingers like smooth silk; so precious- but just momentary impressions.
This was the book that I stowed away in my shift bag.
That when the town settled into its sleepy summertime rhythm and all the reports and chores had been crossed off the list, this was my world between calls- buried in a simple storyline where the outside world was temporarily put on mute. In the thick and sticky humidity of a warm evening, I would sit perched on the thin ledge of the back wall, leaned against the outside of the station with my legs kicked out in front of me along the top. Cars rush by on the road to the bridge that leads off the island in soft humming, a constant lullaby like waves, of people bustling about to return to their homes after a full day. The woods just beyond the back pad would chime in with the occasional bird song or the whispers of rustling leaves and branches rubbing together in long, thin sighs in response to coastal breaths skimming off of the water. The muffled squawking of radio transmission would sing in a dissonant harmony, drifting from the wide, open bay doors and the sun sinks slowly in the salty air to its resting place behind where the water meets the sky- just like it did every day before.
Now I sit here, the same book in hand, grasping at the fading wisps of a memory. The world beyond my book is quiet and empty, devoid of the life I once failed to appreciate when I had it.