My Meat Is Also My Poison

This was written by a very distraught self after finishing Divergent by Veronica Roth and rereading Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins yesterday evening.

Subtitled: Sentimental and Emotional Reader In the Making (Or Perhaps It Has Already Been Made)

Books are amazing. They are the reason of my continuous existence, the building blocks of my entire system, the monomers of my body. They bring endless joy to me in my most depressing moods. They whisk me away to fantastic magical kingdoms, tragic dystopian eras and nostalgic historical settings, where I lose myself in the oh-so-much-more-interesting-than-my-life-will-ever-be plots and twists of the story, making me forget the world entirely, providing an escape route from the torturous reality that is my daily routine of a life. I fall in love with strong female personalities, absolutely charming boys that we can never find in real life as well as loyal friends and families who will never leave our sides despite all the shit we’re going through; and I also learn to hate the villains and antagonists of the tale which isn’t necessarily a bad thing because (cheese warning!) we all know there cannot be good without bad in the world. I become a part of their universe. We are one and the same, all illusions of separation and distinction in the form of fragrant pages gone without so much as a thought.

But those books, they manage to destroy and ruin every fiber of my being as well, delivering plummeting blow after plummeting blow at my face, gut and mind. They torture my tear glands and then take pleasure in mocking them, my weakness and vulnerability. They leave a gaping hole in my heart that can never be filled, a hole so hollow it is so hard to breathe at times. Then there is the dull pain and nausea that starts in the gut, twisting all organs and vessels in my abdominal region, making me bend over for air as I suppress the bile and vomit hovering just over the edge of my throat. It feels as if all feelings of goodness and joy and ecstasy are gone forever, sucked by a Dementor, and nothing will ever be happy again. This sets off a consistent, throbbing ache in my head which doesn’t work well with the stinging in my eyes as I weep for tragedies and sad endings and just plainly the fact that a certain literary universe I had the opportunity to live in with my favourite characters is coming to an end. So much depression, so much sorrow over the lost hope of things ever returning to the way it was again.

Ah, the perks and not-perks of being an extreme book enthusiast.

PS. Thought of the day: Have you ever wondered if there are other living beings in other universes who lead even less interesting lives as ours (shocking) and their novels are about stories as interesting as our lives? Since our novels tell the stories of protagonists who lead much, much more interesting lives than ours?