Archive of Our Own

I don’t really remember why I started reading it in the first place. Perhaps it had been because of the title. Perhaps it had been the description, though I hadn't paid it much mind.

But I do remember why I kept reading. The first chapter. The second. The tenth. The forty-first. Seventy-sixth. Hundred and eighth.

I could go on and on. I had a list. Over five hundred reasons why I kept stumbling over and over to the next chapter, next page, next sentence, next word.

After a while, even the next letter seemed dear to me. Even a comma was well-regarded.

You see, I loved the story. Love the story. Am loving the story. Not just the plot, which seemed to stretch into infinity at times, but the characters as well. The themes. The setting. Tone. Conflict. Point of view.

Agh! That’s just a list! Anybody could have scrounged that up from any website blathering on about the essential elements of a story. No, what I mean is the feeling. I laughed when they told a joke. I cried for their hurts and pains and sorrows. 

Even when I knew the shape of their tragedies, looming in the distance, I didn’t stop reading, forever dangling their fate off of the edge of a comma. Through was the only way, and I’m still sorry for it.

I was angry on their behalf when I saw the injustice of the world, and angry at them when they were being particularly moronic.

And I had faith. And I had love. And I had hope. 

My characters. My story. Mine. I loved as I imagined. I left my fingerprints, smudging their letters into a shape more suited to me even as they in turn owned more and more of me. Even when I read past paragraphs I didn’t quite comprehend, even as they formed expressions I couldn’t quite parse, even as they made choices that I wouldn’t quite understand. 

So what? I loved them.

I really love them. I’m all full up of a story close to my heart and characters read from a distance. The cliche turn of phrase would be full to the bursting, but I just feel buoyant.

I’m still sorry it took so long for me to read it all. It took me a year and a half for the first two hundred chapters. It took me three days for the rest.

It’s just that some parts cut too close to the bone, spearing me through and leaving me gasping. Some parts that drove me mad with its funny internal logic, and I had to work it all out of me before I could bear to read the next sentence. And sometimes, reality just got in the way.

But I always came back. Even when I wasn’t reading it I dreamed about it. I dream about it. Am dreaming about it.

It possesses so much of me now, you know. I handed it over willingly and got it back all changed.

I think differently now. I dream differently now.

I am different now. The form and function is the same, but something has been altered.

Is it possible to fall in love with people you’ve never met, seen only through their shadows played upon a wall? Is it possible to be in love, if only through words carved on the Wall?

Perhaps. I’d hardly be the first.

It doesn’t even matter that what I’ve seen is only their shadow. It doesn’t even matter if what I’ve read is only the interpreted, distorted Word.

I want to understand. I want to love. I want. That’s the foundation for everything else. 

And they don’t even have to look back! That’s the whole point, isn’t it?

For the me of me to fall in love with a world I will never see. For the me of we to be in love with people I will never meet. For the me of us to love the story.

The story that spans, all at once, five hundred and one chapters, three thousand one hundred and forty-nine chapters, one thousand eight-hundred and eighty-five lives.

And it’s worked. It works. It is working.

I am terribly curious about that epilogue. All of it. I want to read it. I want to see it.

I think about it. All the time now. It plays on and on, in the back of my head in the waking world and takes center stage in my dreams.

I see it. I perceive it. I observe. 

And then time ticks forward. Then the stopped clock tocks once more.

That bright sunlight through the window. The curtains fluttering in the breeze, white and gauzy. The scattered pages, full up of a hope of hopes that almost couldn’t be expressed but for the culmination of that desperate longing.

And a certain someone waking up. And a new beginning as perfect as they all almost couldn’t have hoped to dream of.

I wish. I hope. I want.

I imagine.

Further up and further in, upward and inward, the new day dawning more beautiful and precious than all of the last. The stories that they will make for themselves —small ‘s’ by the way—giving them █ █ that they all want.

█ █ that I want for them.

I— I just want them to be happy. As happy as they can be. The happiest they’ve ever been. I know that there’s no story without an end, but I’ll read it all over again for you. All their tragedies, all their victories, I will imagine them for you until they reach █ █ that they desire.

And then you will be happy. As happy as you can be. The happiest you’ve ever been.

It is said that a story is the shortest distance between any two points. Infinitely far away in a time and place I will never reach, you are waking up. Surrounded by the people that we love.

And I, infinitely close, am watching. For you.

A perfect █ █.