When a new blog is just an old blog.

May 19, 2006
10:53am

"Intimacy with fiction"

When it happens, the relationship that forms means that in those brief moments - those lapses in time - nothing else exists except for that which you hold so delicately in your hands. You keep the tightly bound hardcover (or if you prefer, paperback - which I rarely do) on your bed stand, you read the words of another's imagination before you sleep and if given an opportunity, immediately when you wake. And if you have long stretches of time to beckon you from one hour to the next (as I do right now) then any space, whether between the white of your summer sheets or the cool corner of a closet, becomes a space for you and the words to live, even dwell perhaps.

In those brief moments, the voice of the writer somehow intertwines with your own. There is a union of sorts that establishes itself and fortifies with each turning of the page. Distinctions between the truth and reality you exist in and that which you have been breathing in with your reading are erased by increasing irrelevance. You become enamored with the characters that are so carefully crafted and eloquently illustrated - as if you actually know them or have met them in a previous occasion. Sometimes, it stays with you in your subconscious and you find them residing in your dreams, however strange and fantastical they may be.

And even when you have breathed in the last words of the last page, the book is closed but you know it hasn't quite ended because everything else still remains at a distance - paused - and the madness that you had just been intoxicated by, the madness dreamt up by someone who is not you, that is the madness that runs rampant in your thoughts. It is a terrifying notion to entertain because the rational part of you knows that it is only the influence of a stranger's words that have taken hold of you. They are not real. They are not real in the same way that none of it was real. But what is real are these moments now - these inevitably fleeting moments that you have at your keyboard to try and capture what the writing has made you feel, or inspired to feel, before it leaves you altogether.

In these moments there is a familiar comfort that has come to sit with you.

In these moments you remember - you are most certain of it - that you, too, are a writer. You have always been a writer. And you remember, you celebrate it, you breathe it in.

"Every writer has been given a gift. They get to live life twice."