There is no feeling in the world like finishing a good book.

It’s like a slap in the face, or getting a bucket of ice water poured on your head. It’s a jolt that causes me to realize that I haven’t been in my body for the past – a glance at the clock – seven hours.

Nothing mattered. I was running through the streets of Ketterdam, a thief fighting the odds alongside Kaz Brekker, I was battling he who must not be named with my fellow students and professors, I was Aelin Galathynius and no one could stop me.

But once my eyes greedily devour what’s left on that page, I’m back to being me.

Just a girl with cold feet, a stiff posture and the most marvelous one pound object in front of me.

I’ll spend the rest of the day in a blind daze. Wondering why I am no longer in Ketterdam, or at Hogwarts.

And it hurts. A physical ache in my chest. Why isn’t this me? Why aren’t I living this kind of life?

And its an awful realization that I’m not.

For the rest of the day I’m shaky, seconds away from crying for no good reason. I’m hyperaware of whatever I’m doing in the world around me, but lost, aimlessly drifting in a world that seems like it’s not quite real.

I’m lost, just wanting to be able to read the book for the first time again. To get lost all over again.

I wander through the house, wanting that life, wanting to just disappear into the books that I love, to live these incredible lives.

Despite the struggle, the scars, the damage, the truly horrendous pasts that give dimension to the people who I am closer to than anyone else in the world, I want to be these people.

And **** the writers who create these worlds and these people. I run from my emotions and yet I can’t run from reading, and emotions are all I get from reading. I can’t bring myself to run from these writers. I’m like a junkie who hates what they do to themselves but loves the ride too much.

All I want to do is read and never reach the end. But equally so, the end is the best part. I am constantly tempted to rip out the last page and toss it to hell but I can’t. I always walk through the fire for it.

It’s not like finishing a movie or a show. That is me watching someone else doing something. When I finish a book, I have been put through the same ringer the characters have. I have lived the same life.

Part of my soul is fulfilled and yet a larger part of it is missing. Finishing a book is losing a part of myself. A part of myself that I have committed hours to, I have paced for, I have lived for.

When I finish a book, I finish a lifetime. I say goodbye to friends who never knew me but I knew them. I say goodbye to a family that I loved in that time more than I have ever loved. I say goodbye to a reincarnation of myself. I say goodbye to something that doesn’t even know I exist and yet has wrecked me.

There is no feeling in the world like finishing a good book.

It is a feeling akin to finding the one thing in all of life that you search for, and losing the one thing in all the universe that you cannot stand to lose.