It was a feeling I'd almost forgotten: the rush of being sucked in, totally absorbed into another experience, another world.

Real life fades from view as you are swallowed whole by a life you will never lead and exploits you will never own, if not for those few hours when you were not yourself. You awaken as if from a realistic dream, only to find nothing has actually changed since you left. Frustration comes with the fog as it clears from your peripheral and you are mildly annoyed at reality for interrupting.

Even this was happily familiar, though: the agitation of the end. The awkward transition from print to palpable, the sad acceptance that there is no more. The hunger that was so recently whetted rings, reinstating itself.

I can't believe it has been this long since I read a pure, unadulturated fiction entirely unaware of itself and its audience except that it has a purpose to be carried out. That purpose is strictly just to exist, and to do so as openly and honestly as a paperback can. It felt so good holding it, so right and familiar in muscle memory, folded between my fingers and postcoital in a geeky book nerd kind of way. A cleansed kind of way.

Words are my life and information my lifeblood, but too much nonfiction is bad for the soul.

That said, read The Kite Runner.
It'll make you want to write.

ink :: graphite