If you're a reader you probably grasp what I'm talking about here when I say I feel what the characters feel.
Not just in "an outsider looking in attempting to be empathetic" way, like so many real situations are for me.
but as in "I am the one experiencing this pain and these pages show what I'm feeling here and now" way.
Today by reading a book I experienced the pain of losing a loved one by suicide and that may seem insane and rash to say, considering there are people who truly have had friends kill themselves, but for me during the three hundred and seventy eight pages of this book, it was ME who lost somebody.
I felt that same deep guttural emptiness that makes you sob with no sound because you don't have any air because you can't breathe because the person you love is dead.
And this is why I read.
I read to experience all of the hopes and loves and pains and sorrows that one can never get to in one lifetime
but by reading stories upon stories I get to live many lives.
I get to understand how to survive in a post apocalyptic world through courage, stubbornness, and sheer dumb luck.
I get to experience supernatural power, bloodletting, and romance.
I get to get inside of a serial killer's mind and see how a murderer chooses his kills.
I get to feel loss like I've never felt before. Cruelty like never before. Insanity like never before.
And of course I get to fall in love for the first time over and over. A feeling I never want to live without.
When I read I get to live many lives, instead of just one.
And this is why I read.
