Do you ever get that feeling
The feeling
When you're ten pages away from the end of a book you love?
You know the one-
That ache
That mingled fear and longing and nostalgia
A strange, electric urgency, a need to race to an ending you don't actually want to arrive at.
It is such a distinct, such a strangely painful feeling.
Do you ever feel it
When you look at your own eyes in the mirror?

I am sat in a cramped seat on a dimly lit plane
And a child wails somewhere beyond me,
Something between a giggle and a sob
And for the first time since I can remember
I don't know where I'm going.
And I want to drown myself in books.
Other people's stories.
I want to smother this feeling in them,
I want to live in the middle of someone else's life and never emerge again.
For the first time ever
I don't know where I'm going.

I can't explain this feeling.
It isn't the feeling I've had before, the tired sort of feeling you get when snow begins to trickle from the clouds on a fall day
And you just know in your bones that it will be
A hard, brutal winter.
Nor is it the feeling I've become familiar with
Of a spring which has somehow become lodged in my sternum and pressed to its breaking point,
That excruciating, itching tension and worry.
It isn't the feeling I've woken up to on countless mornings-
A creeping dread which feels like nothing so much as cold, clammy fingers running softly along every inch of your skin, except inside.

No, this feeling is one of total newness.
It is blind uncertainty.
It is a feeling of transition that I suppose I've suffered too much, previously, to have noticed or lingered in
And yet this time I find I've stuck fast in it
Like a shoe in a particularly deep patch of mud, when you tug and pull but the earth perversely refuses to relinquish your foot.
I've snagged, like a new coat on a briar bush
In this feeling of unsettled, unfinished, unsatisfied... expectancy.
Not of anything bad but certainly as well
Not of anything good.
I have, suddenly, upon being truly alone for the first time in a long time,
Discovered that I am moorless
And yet stalled.

And it isn't just that first feeling, no.
It is half of that feeling, that
"I don't want to finish the book" feeling.
But it is also equally the feeling you might get
If you were ten pages to go in your riveting novel,
Only to turn one and suddenly find that the rest was blank,
Halfway through a sentence
Halfway through a word
Nothing resolved, and nothing explained.
And maybe you'd keep turning, hoping for a mistake in the binding
But all ten are the same
Smooth. White. Blank. Waiting.
It is that feeling of grief and frustration and slight fear
A fondness for all the pages read before
But a craving for more that will not come
As if the ink would simply syphon away, even if you were, in your desperation
To write them yourself.

Yes, it's that feeling
Only about myself. About my life.
And I don't know when it will end
Or what it will end into.

I don't want it.
Tell me stories.
Tell me stories for the rest of my days
And never let my mind
Fall silent.