Come crashing down.

The inevitable end of Atonement has come crashing down on my lonesome little twin bed in Brighton.

I always experience the end of books this way. Or at least the end of beloved novels. The bulk, the bulge of their momentum gathers behind me as I read helplessly on, wanting to savor the delicious details one by one, but unable to stop myself from cramming them into my head pagefulls at a time. I binge on prose. I love it, and then it ends. And I am, frankly, bereft. I grieve the loss of my looking glass into the lives of beloved characters, people I feel that I have come to know and love. People whose most intimate, solitary moments I have witnessed. They are gone, and I will miss them. I will miss their lives unfolding. I will miss looking in.

I have the sensation of a wave building especially with tragedies. Especially with tragic love stories. I want to slosh around in that moment of declaration, when the lovers are young and beautiful and full of the possibility of loving each other…I don’t want to leave. Yet the narrative moves on; it must, and I must.

The crash of separation comes down hard on me (harder, I imagine, than on others – but of course this is impossible to know), a dedicated optimist, and I remember, every time, body-surfing on Nantucket when I was about ten. It was a grey, overcast day, not very warm but not raining, and I insisted on swimming. Ten-year-olds do. The waves were huge, making foam a permanent presence on the surface of the ocean to about fifty feet out or so. Everything was grey – grey-brown beach, grey-light sky, deep grey water. And then there was me, in some horrible black-and-fluorescent swirly suit. Trying to take part in it. This one wave came that dragged me the length of its curling, pummeling the breath out of me underwater, flipping me senseless. I came up at some benign depth, but immediately was slapped down by another curl of water. And so on, until I rolled up on the grey beach, breathless, having had my fill.

This is what tragedies are to me. It’s all fun and games, however foreboding, until the letdown comes…and then I just get beat to a pulp until the end. It won’t stop; I’m already steeped way in there, a helpless observer of my own weepy fate. I suppose the end is merciful, in its way. Really I couldn’t bear to go on.

I don’t think I could write such a story. Not now; not while I inevitably cast myself as the spirited heroine (for who would cast themselves as Briony, the unwitting Iago of her own story?) . Not while she and I share the barely caged heart of a twentysomething single woman. Not while my life is to be lived, my husband, God willing, to be married, my children, God willing, to be born and raised. I couldn’t do it. It’s too ruthless. I would feel like I was cutting myself, or downing too many pills. A story decades away, in a different country, whose heroine doesn’t even remotely resemble me in appearance, inclination, or manner, is still too close to my own fragile reality. It’s that simple; to me, it is not just a story…a great one can be almost a prayer that I will ardently wish to live out.

I don’t think I’ve grown completely out of that childlike fascination with stories. I am still able to lose sense of my separateness from the page. Perhaps there is some missing developmental link there; more than one person in my life has delicately hinted to me that I lack some sagacity. I daresay they’re right; still, I’m reluctant to let go of that complete entrance into another world.

Will I forever be this girl?

[note: I really am unable to keep these posts from being appallingly personal. Perhaps I'll learn with time - until then I hope these aren't too bare to bear. So to speak.]