Its amazing how you get attached to fictional characters in books...sometimes even more than how much you allow yourself to be in real life. Its amazing how the make-believe sorrows make you cry or how you laugh with the happiness that is carefully constructed with a melange of words.
And when I think of it...I feel that every page is a key that opens the doors to the character's life. Doors through which you can see every thought of his/hers...good or bad. Doors that let you into the privacy of their bedrooms as easily as they let us access the public porches of their lives. You read into their words that remain unspoken. You know their fears, ambitions, secrets, regrets....the way you can never know a living person. And when the character dies, the loss is as though you have lost an old friend...or maybe even more. Th image that you build in your mind, the face that you construct from bits of words and phrases doesn't leave your mind...and the dull ache remains.
Everytime I decide to maintain that no-mans-land between reality and fiction. And yet I end up crossing it; and when the line between the two blurs, there is no looking back. You see bits of yourself in the characters...the fears that you refuse to accept, the regrets that you refuse to let go, the secrets that you smother inside....somewhere the fiction of our lives connects with the reality of the character.
