There’s something a little surreal and a little disconcerting about reading the acknowledgements at the end of a book. You turn the pages, hoping for more of the story even though you know it’s over. You hope because you’re a hopeless romantic, and you can’t bear for the story to be finished. Why couldn’t the author have simply added a post-epilogue epilogue? Why not a post-post-script?
As it always goes, the story ends and there’s nothing more – unless the author has been so kind as to write a sequel. But even series must come to an end at some point. It’s a surreal thing, to be yanked out of a world you had been so invested in for so many hours. To watch worlds build up in your mind’s eye, to see those characters brought to life, to see their mannerisms and to hear their voices – it’s so easy to get lost in these places, in these people. And it’s easy to be just as lost as soon as their story ends. You know how their story ends; you see it, written before you. Those characters, those places, are frozen in time from the moment your eyes absorb those last words.
Maybe, you think, if I re-read the entire thing right now, the story won’t end. It’ll just keep going, and the story won’t stop. You hope that maybe the characters you’ve managed to fall in and out, and maybe even back in love with again will continue to grow and live and carry out the rest of their days, until either you die, or they do.
Your story, however, carries on. And that is surreal. How can you simply carry on existing, when so many others have become nothing more than a world confined between two covers? To go from watching the story play out as a movie in your head, to watching your hands slide the same story onto a shelf, to be looked at and fondly remembered?
It’s like being shaken awake from a train ride-induced sleep, or having someone snap their fingers in your face to bring you out of a daydream. The wild franticness of unknowing, of being forced back into reality, is entirely jarring and uncomfortable. What do you mean, I have to deal with a pissy barista? And thanks for the offer, but I’d rather not be stuffed into an overcrowded subway car. I want to be back in my own head, tucked safely between the pages, peering over my character’s shoulders, watching their lives unfold.
p.s., I don’t know if you can tell, but I don’t like things to end. There’s a bizarre reality that exists in the moments after an ending, a strange transitionary period whose sole purpose is to reintroduce us to the land of the living after being immersed in the story. This reality is a nearly constant state that I live in, and after two decades you would think that I’d have gotten at least a tiny bit accustomed to it.
p.p.s.
Bet you thought I was done, didn’t you?
