detachment

I hate the last pages of books. You spend a month or more poring through lives not your own, knowing people you do not see, hearing their thoughts, feeling their pain or happiness or confusion… and then all of a sudden, the connection ends. You wind up lost in your own world again, the people you met, you knew, you lived and breathed with through the confines of the printed page are forever out of your grasp. Somehow, I feel like I was cheated out of a friendship. I am always left hanging, no matter how skillfully the author has ended the story. You get friends for awhile, you grow with them and then suddenly you’re alone in your room again staring at blank walls while their lives are all cleanly summarized into a happily ever after or otherwise. It’s an unexplicable sense of melancholy and happiness to notice the unread pages of a book thin out until all your holding is the cardboard end cover… happy that the story finally comes to fruition and sad that it ends.

Still, no matter how strongly I feel about this, I hate unfinished book series. It just drags on and on…

What am I saying…!?!

I guess it gets tiring after awhile. One can read just as so much books. I remember my folly from before wishing to read every book and story ever written (I don’t even have enough time to read much these days…). I’m addicted to stories except my own. I wish life would just be as easy as stories: everything laid out for a central plot, each character given specific meaning; growth measured and reflected upon, meaning found in almost everything, changes as natural as seasons. But then again, isn’t life the grandest of all stories and all adventures? I wish sometimes that I could just take a spectator’s view of all this though; life always seems to be easier from a distance.

Anyway, lately ‘life’, with all the drama, romance, magic and whatnot everyone puts on this short word, seems to be at a distance to me. I jokingly say ‘I have no life’ and its becoming apparent that mere existence is all I focus on: mechanical nights and days, routinary habits and catatonic dreamlessness. There’s always something more urgent to focus on and the rest of the day is spent just running away from more. I hope I am not forgetting myself nor am I disregarding what is important… I just seem to not have the energy or the temperament to deal with a lot.

I feel the walls closing in again; the instinct to pull back and isolate myself is very tempting. Classic loner syndrome, I feel like I’m around too much people a lot that I just want to be alone when I could. Am I wearing myself thin? Is it healthier to fall back to old habits?