fictioI watch as the words become images;
People, places, adventures.
They become an entirely new world,
A world separate from reality.

I stare at the pages
And let the screaming fade into the background.
I get lost in the words
And the chaos becomes nothing more than white noise.
I watch as the character’s lives play out
And ignore the grief that plagues my own every day.

I am content in that realm of fiction,
Happy even.
But after a few hours it’s over.
They’ve completed their quests, found their true love,
Discovered some sort of meaning in life.  

And I’m stuck once again in the horror that is reality.  
A place where there aren’t happy endings,
Where you aren’t eager to know what happens next, but fearful.
A place where you’re trapped,
Where you can’t just close the pages and ignore it when it becomes too much.
The only solace in this place is
Knowing that you can open another set of pages and
Escape into that other world
Once more.