Why I Read Standing Up

I’m on my feet ten hours a night at the restaurant, sometimes twelve on a bad Friday, and you’d think the last thing I’d want to do when I get home is stand up some more, since just standing up tires a person out. But I do it anyway. Book open on my kitchen counter, coffee going cold next to it, one foot up on the cabinet rail like I’m working a station.

I tried a chair for about three weeks once. Bought a decent one, the kind with lumbar support, stuck it by the window where the light’s good in the afternoon. Fell asleep in it twice reading the same paragraph over and over. Once I fell asleep sitting there with the book still open on my chest and woke up at 4am with a crick in my neck, missed the start of prep the next morning by twenty minutes because some part of me had decided sitting down meant the shift was already over. Marcus took the chair off my hands the next week, same way he clears a station at close, same direction half my games and half my paperbacks came from him in the first place, just running backward for once. It’s fine. It’s just not a chair that works on me.

The act of standing there keeps something on, some low hum of attention that a chair switches off, and I couldn’t tell you exactly why, except that ten years of not being allowed to sit during a shift does something to a person’s nervous system eventually. The counter’s home base anyway, same spot I chop onions on my day off, same spot I signed for a delivery once at 2am half asleep. My body already knows without a thought what standing there means. It means working. It doesn’t mean winding down, and apparently I need that little bit of doesn’t-mean-winding-down to actually pay attention to a page.

It changes what I end up reading, too, whether I mean it to or not. You can’t stand for an hour with a six hundred page doorstop propped open, your feet won’t let you, your back starts complaining around page forty and then you’re not reading anymore, you’re negotiating with your own spine about how much longer this is going to take. So I gravitate toward books that move, shorter chapters, something with actual forward motion to it, or I take the long ones in these small bites instead, four pages before my eyes go on a bad night, and just close it right there mid scene without waiting for a chapter to end. A few of my favorite reads on here happened exactly that way, in pieces, standing at that counter, never once sat through start to finish in a single stretch, twenty minutes some nights before I had to give up and go to bed.

Same deal with writing the reviews themselves. The Clank! review got written exactly like that, standing right there between last call and the dishwasher finishing its cycle, typing on my phone propped against the coffee maker, cleaning it up later on the laptop but always starting on my feet. Sitting down at a desk to write about a game would feel like clocking back in somewhere, like the review became a second shift instead of the thing I do after one, and I never sit down to work the way people sit down on a break. Standing at the counter still feels like being off. Like it’s mine and nobody’s timing it.

I know it doesn’t add up on paper, more standing after a day that was already all standing up. But sitting down to read started feeling like a chore I was assigning myself, another task on the list, and standing at that counter is just something my body already knows how to do without being told.