What fills a book? Certainly, it contains pages filled with nouns and verbs that create the story of a certain character. We, the readers, read the character’s inner thoughts and associate with their feelings, from content to gloom, disappointment to satisfaction, and even heartbreak to love. A book escorts its reader from the beginning to the end with promise of distractions, disruptions, and struggles, but also of love and resolve and sometimes laughter. I believe books are living beings, for the characters within them speak to me and tell me they are living and that they have lived. I imagine my life as being written of in a book, for to be a book would be what I have heard people describe as “the good life.”
As a book, my story would already be written. There would be no unwritten for me to write, nor would there be a written for me to rewrite. The words would already be there. I would have insurmountable knowledge, for I would have access to every mistake I had made or would make. There would be no surprise. And in the end, when all is said and done, I will have learned a lesson; a lesson I would never forget because it will be inscribed upon my page.
I would never have to ponder if I had yet found myself because the character within me would already be developed. The infamous question, “Who am I?” may pass by my lips once, but as I am a book, I will be sure to find the answer. There would be no mystery to interrupt me. I could never be unsure; I’d have the perfect confidence. And this sureness would produce only black and white, with no gray for me to stumble over as I bounce from one side of the color spectrum to the next.
The book would contain mainly my thoughts. And there I would be for pages and pages on end: dancing, crying, laughing and maybe romancing. It would be my voice the reader would hear and everybody would love me, for the main character is always loved and portrayed in an admirable light. I would be the hopeless case and they would plea for the writer to fix and repair me. And the writer would listen; she would set my world right in the end.
Patient, on the book shelve, I would sit. I’d be waiting for some desperate reader to pick me up, search my pages, and look within me to find that we relate. So great my story would be, that I would inspire philosophers. They would question and study my words, hoping to find a similar answer or meaning to their own lives. That final phrase, written in black type, indicating “the end,” would be my declaration of freedom, a freedom from wandering hopeless, like people do. I’d have immunity from the search. And while the people walk through the rain of life, their glasses foggy, I would be secure within my binding.