reading makes me lonely

It always happens. There seems to be no way around it. Without exception, every time I find myself about to finish a good novel I come to a point of no return. While this point may come in different ways for each reader (or even not at all), for me it occurs precisely at the moment I realize that with the turn of a single piece of paper I will have come to the last page of the book. No matter how much attention I pay to the rising page numbers as I march closer to the end, the final page always manages to sneak up and surprise me. It is at that moment that I fall into a myriad of emotions and thoughts. There is the instant sense of apprehension, not unlike the feelings one experiences right before the delayed but inevitable departure of someone you love. The characters of the novel have reached a point at which they are no longer merely ‘characters,’ but have in fact been promoted to legitimate parts of my life. Is this strange? They have broken free from their realm of fiction and are now as real as my family soundly asleep one floor above me. I think about my literary friends and how they would act in situations not recorded in the novel. I refuse to let them rest when I close the book and instead imagine them existing even when I’m not bringing them to life when reading. Somehow I find myself living vicariously through them and perhaps even allow them to do the same through me.

Up until the point of no return I always hold within myself the choice to simply say ‘goodnight’ to my Sudanese friend Achak, knowing full well that I will pick up the conversation the next morning. Or perhaps I might choose to fight the urge to say goodbye until my eyelids cannot hold up any longer and slowly lose the battle as sleep and gravity work together to silently pull them closed. As the book softly comes to rest upon my steadily undulating chest, my only thoughts have to do with where the story will lead my friends and I in the pages to follow.

But then one night it hits me in the face like a phone call from a morgue; there are only one and a half pages remaining between my right thumb and forefinger and I will promptly be left all alone. Abandoned. My fictitious friends will not move on without me as I would like to believe, but will simply cease to exist as my voyeuristic trip comes to a screeching halt, brought on by two fateful little words;


the

end.