the dog wants to snuggle
ending books leaves me quiet. i try to play a clever game with the chapters. as i near the last 200 pages, i'll break my reading periods into smaller and smaller segments until i become truly desperate: reading only a page, or so, a day. but the pages dwindle; my will to sit and lovingly, reverently, slowly engage the reality falls to my need for the denouement. by the last 50, i can't stop. as soon as the final act is within sight, i frenzy and gulp the climax. everything ceases. i pull over to the side of the road in abandoned parts of town and read it in a single, car-light, eye-squinting, apoplexy. the windows fog, gas fumes eke their way into the cab and i bolt to the last line. i never read the the author's note or epilogue. i stop. i just sit in the noiseless car. in a noiseless world. it's quiet. the characters pad their way softly off-stage; the set blinks off, gas-light by gas-light; a stoic janitor stands in the wings waiting. sometimes, morals or longings echo in keystone archways, but that soon fades. and i'm left, quietly sitting, an emptied book in my lap. i tick the page corners with the pad of my index finger. they soundlessly flap. but, true to course, the quietude never lingers. around the edges, at first, a stray passerby; a mercurial, bestial grunt for food: and i think. i think away all the grottoes i just explored, all the subtexts i plumbed. i think away all the extrema i just read. all the adventures, sorrows, gaffes and guffaws suffocate in my thoughts as i, irrevocably, think away the story. that's why i hate ending books. i can't sit afterward and be quiet with them. i can't just let what happened stay tantalizingly in my mouth, savoring the wasabi vibrance - my gluttonous soda-thoughts always rush in and wipe out all nuances of the book. the momentary solitude, serenity vacate and the vacuum is brimmed and teaming once again. i entertain a hiccup moment of self-awareness while i think about not thinking into the quiet. shamefaced and reluctant, i wonder if the quiet ever really existed. that is, of course, until the next book - the next grail quest. the next frenzied attempt to hold the quiet after finishing a book