You know that moment where you just don’t know how to feel after you’ve closed the back cover of a book? You know that lost feeling where you just crave the story to continue on or wish it were all real… It’s really amazing how much a book can really spark some of that creative thought within a person. A really good book is one that leaves its readers in deep thought, searching for more. In The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger put it quite nicely when he wrote:
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”
Those lingering thoughts and feelings after reading a really great book can bring about so much emotion, or lack thereof, in a person. After an amazing story ends I’m either left with overwhelming hope, heartbreak, or I’m just incapable of feeling anything at all. I know after reading a really great story, I’ll miss my newfound fictional friends and I can’t wait to pick them up again someday.
But sometimes these stories can really feel real, or possible in this world. For instance, maybe a zombie outbreak really will come from a superbug one day, or maybe a deep, dark love story is brewing in the city somewhere; maybe these real life takes on these stories simply never find their way to us directly but in other ways. From dreams to comics to books and movies, the more we dive deep into these stories, we might start to take them on as our favorite characters would.
The adventure begins when we open up the book, its very first few pages begin to create a map of the unknown. As the pages fly by, we find ourselves lost within a fictional world we don’t want to escape. Our mind’s ability to figure out reality takes on a life of its own and its only wishes is to continue exploring this vast new world. Words have a powerful way of transcending from the pages their ink is on and into our very souls. It paints a part of us we didn’t know was bare and coats the walls with everlasting memories.
When a book ends we’re always left torn; our fingers numb from flipping, our hearts beating from the rush of what was to come. We now know of a place we want to be a part of, a world we are desperate to fit ourselves into and live on in. It’s often so bittersweet to finish a book because once we know the end is near – a part of us grips tight to not finish no matter how hard we wish to know what happens. We don’t really want to leave this world behind and return to our own. We’ve become aware of what imagination can do and feel a need to hold onto that writer’s world in a way we never thought possible. But in the end, we let it come; we let the end come to us like a leaf smacking us in the face on a blustery day. No matter how much it hurts, we know we are alive and we will find ourselves in the next book we pick up for that rollercoaster ride to carry us on one more time.
Collaboration with Cassandra Vella
Featured image via Kinga Cichewicz on Unsplash
