Books ending

I've just finished reading a book (American Gods by Neil Gaiman) and it's put me into a thoughtful mood. 


When I read book I read them, allowing my whole self to become absorbed into the words. Have you ever thought about that imagery? Absorbed? Like my fingers stick to the pages, then melt into the pages and the rest of me follows. Time fades, sensations fade, noise fades and I lose myself and there is only the story.


It feels like diving, in a way. I get submerged and it takes thought and effort to swim to the surface and become aware again of the real world and things I should be doing in it. When I'm there for hours the submersion so total that my sensory to the outside world is completely blocked. 


Then when the story ends, abruptly, suddenly (because I've been reading the words, not noticing the thinning stack of pages against my right hand) the real world and the story world collide jarringly. The sounds and the textures of the story have filled me so completely and when the characters are ripped from existence there is a silence like no other silence I have experienced. Even though I haven't been making a sound for hours the quiet is now eerie and sharp and expansive. It's like an inhale of breath, it's a void that used to be full of so much noise. It leaves a ringing echo, when the book closes. I had so much and inexplicably it's all gone and I am left lonely and cold. 


I am a reader, if you haven't guessed. I love stories. They are timeless and seem to inhabit a negative space. Stories can do amazing things yet they live on printed pages and in finite space. You can go there, become wholly changed, yet return to find everything exactly as you left it, only now all the meanings have changed. Is it strange that they can do that? Is it strange that we can do that?


Go read a story. Go make a story.