There is a light (under the covers) that never goes out.

They ask me why I read. 

I tell them it that makes me happy, but that is untrue. How do I tell them the truth? How do I explain the fact that for most of my life, I've lived in a paracosm. A world of my own creation, because reality was never quite enough for me? That my mind was a box I never stepped out of, and the leather-bound frame of a book was the frame of my only window to the world outside. That its pages were a portal that transported me to lands near and far, to times enveloping the past, the present, and the furthest discernible future, where I learned about beauty, art, society, and the world when my immediate reality was too disappointing, or too insipid, or too predictable for me to step into. That my restless self wanted to run so fast that while the terrain and the training wheels felt like an insult to my capacity, my mind was hyperactive enough to construct cobbled streets, race-tracks and open-fields down to detailing the texture of the dorsal wing of the common swift moth perched on the rusted cross-arm of the gothic street lamp. That I knew people and understood them before I could speak to them. That viewing the world through so many eyes conferred upon me the capacity to be anything I needed to be, and what I could have became only a question of what I wanted. That the world's worth of knowledge and experience is condensed so much better into volumes, pages and nifty little constructs of sentences, for those who lack the patience, capacity, or poorer sense to wade through all the garbage that clutters an unaided experience of the world. That one needn't read to believe, but one must read to weigh, and to consider. That the mind is a machine which needs intellectual stimulus for fuel, and that reading is often a person's best shot at expanding it to its full capacity(or as close as it is possible to get), and that once you're there, there's no going back. How do I explain that reading gives me not just happiness, but everything else that reality is too listless to offer me. And that if it wasn't for this dogged whim of earning a living substantial enough to make my reality half as enthralling as my imagination and paying off the debt incurred in the process, I would still prefer to look out at the world from my window. Because having done that in the past, nothing I've seen since I became a part of it has ever managed to surprise me.

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They ask me why I think so much. 

How do I tell them that knowing the things I know, it's the only sensible thing left to do?