What Reading a Book is Like

Sometimes when I finish reading a book I feel like the whole world has suddenly turned upside down or inside out.

I'll look up from my novel, the last page falling free from my hands, and the world is different. Nothing is normal. Everything around me is so beautiful...I feel like it will crush me, obliterate my senses and leave me soundless and unfulfilled. It's like I can see the ebb and flow and shapes and objects in the stucco of my ceiling.

It's like I'm looking at a concept, an idea, played immeasurably throughout all time, and on and on like an airless melody, whose measured beats of time I cannot quite catch.

I try, at least, to catch my breath. My whole being is still caught up in the fragments of pages I just finished, the characters whose lives, to me, have just ended.

I'm caught by darkness. I think, and wonder and am still.

I feel like books change the world.
I feel like books sometimes give me courage to change the world.
I feel like books lift some insubstantial veil from before my eyes--and reveal--

reveal--

someting. Something words cannot capture. Something beyond view or time or memories or thought or

something.
so.
beautiful.
and astonishing and right so that the only thing I can do is meditate and dream upon the ending, the ending that has fulfilled me in wonder and light and ideas

and.

yet there is longing. longing because the story does not ever end and I know I'll never see the breadth of it.

it never ends but something in me wants it to.

after finishing the last word on the page
the last thought
the last look into a world i can never be a part of
but yet a place i feel a part of

i'm left with one thought

a book is better in a sunset

because a book can hold a thousand sunsets

and i realize at last

the only thing that changed is me