Reading transcends time and space. Langston Hughes wrote his poetry to the tempo of his own heartbeat; the stars flicker, the trees **** in water, pulsing to the same collective heartbeat. The oral stories of ancient African and Native American tribes have been lost to time, evaporated into thin air with the water vapor in their ancient breath. If you are quiet, you can hear their impassioned voices whispering their stories in your sleep, despite the fact that their bodies have been crushed by colonization, corpses consumed by the earth, miles and miles preventing their interaction. These stories exist in a place where miles crunch into inches, where whispers are louder than screams, where even oil and water are in love.