I’m not sure if I’m making a mistake by reading so many books. Not for my time or profession or anything like that. I’m worried for my soul. I’m worried that every time I get into a really good story it’s like I’m living someone else’s life for a while, and being pulled into these serious and desperate matters that feel like lifetimes lived over the course of a few days. It ages me. It makes me tired and sick and worn out. But happy, too. Kind of like a drug.

I have this theory on post-traumatic stress and war bonding. It isn’t that people are terrified of what they experienced and relive it out of fear that it will happen again. It’s that in those few moments of tension and intensity, they felt more real than they’ve ever been. What’s happening on the outside doesn’t really matter. They don’t have to like or enjoy that part. What they like is what it does to their mind. How it hones it and makes it sharper, lends them focus and control, the power to fight without holding anything back. That’s why they get flashbacks. It’s the same drug. They need to feel alive like that again. And the only people who can really understand that reality are those who have sat down in the same trenches, and read the same books.

Every book is like throwing myself back upon the steeple of that reality, and I do it so gladly, because I need it so badly. I have to feel that sense of life and death decision, and the automatic follow-through of events. I need my life to be more real in that sense, and less Real in this.

Slowly but surely, it will wear me out, and I wonder what that will feel like in the end. I bet I’ll be ancient. I bet people will look me in the eyes and think “Jeez, where’s he been?” or know just enough that something’s off that they keep walking. I’ll be an old, paper-thin junkie, still jonesing for a fix, well aware that this time, it might push my sanity too far over into that side.

I know this, but I can’t help it. I can’t live without being in at least two places at once. And though I may try do without for just a little while, I keep getting pulled back into just one more story.