As Promised

We've been over that I'm not normal right? We touched on that subject?

That I envelope myself so deeply into fiction sometimes that I have a difficult time finding where it ends and I begin.

Which for children is awesome, but for a 27 year old, does it borderline on crazy?

As promised I finished The Hunger Games series. I started Catching Fire on Tuesday at 7PM and finish on Wednesday at 8PM. I then started MockingJay, which moves a little slower, but just completed it now. I made a point on Tuesday and Wednesday nights to stop at the end of a chapter where nothing huge is dropped on me. Because if you don't stop before that, it's really hard to. And then your nights are restless. I've had many restless nights this week & I think they'll continue for a while as I dissect the books.

The problem is the majority of chapters ends with a cliffhanger, so you can't help but need to read on...

Here's what wretches me, how utterly sad I get for the characters that are lost. I guess on some level I understand the points that are trying to be made, that all life is fragil and in war not everyone gets out a live. But it breaks me. I mourn them. God that sounds insane.

I'm sitting here trying not to cry over fictional characters. Trying to block out the picture of their brutal "deaths." But over the last week, as I walked through their story, they've became a part of me. It doesn't help that the series is written in first person and the author is amazing at articulating exactly how it feels when Katniss is broken. There's one point where she says that it's like her entire body has been covered in tiny cracks and at any moment the smallest vibration could shatter her. Isn't that how a lot of us feel in grief?

I feel like I need to defend myself by pointing out that I do get just as emotional  if not more over the news and things that happen in real life, but to other people. I guess I'm just overly empathetic.

But at the heart of these books is something so much bigger that I'm not even sure the author new she was getting at. And if she did, she did it so well that unless you're paying attention to it, you don't notice. There is one line where she makes it abundantly clear...

"Frankly, our ancestors don't seem much to brag about. I mean, look at the state they left us in, with the wars and the broken planet. Clearly, they didn't care about what would happen to the people who came after them."

That's us. We. Now. Eating up the planet & starting our wars.

Sorry my brains all over the place today. It's hard when I finish a book that good. Hard to focus on much else. But what I do know, is that I want to write something that good and I have the makings of it.

Tick Tock. Tick Tock.