my life as fiction

i have a strange habit of becoming the characters in the novels i read.

i vaguely noticed this for the first time as a child. i wept bitterly when i read jane eyre, felt myself shivering in the cold, cruel red room and feeling her tragedy as if it were my own. i possessed unspeakable magical powers when i read through the chronicles of narnia, passing through wardrobes into uncharted lands and soaring on the lovely aslan. these strange transfigurations would only last as long as the books were open, however, and i was able to quickly transition back to my world of stuffed animals and coloring books.

i only really began living the stories as a senior in high school.
i was reading sylvia plath's the bell jar, a recommendation from a friend, when i first began noticing the largely subconscious changes.
for one, i hadn't been able to sleep properly in weeks.
i began staying up for nights on end, echoing esther's insomnia. i froze my emotions into an impenetrable bell jar and removed them from my friends and family. sometimes i struggled to breathe, sometimes i wondered quite simply when i might walk into an imaginary ocean and sink forever away.
i only snapped back into reality about a month later.


most recently i've been reading a bit of tolstoy. a little war and peace, some of anna karenina.

i flatter myself sometimes that i am like anna, with her firm, light step and dashing eyes, those eyes that contain that fire and life that have been suppressed for so long, but i am probably any arbitrary character, any one of thousands that tolstoy could have picked to fully characterize in his subtle, telling way. i see myself like this, my life described by an omniscient narrator that penetrates my soul, knows my past and my future, understands far more than my shallow character could ever have the foresight to see or comprehend, and i wonder.
is my character learning? is it growing? is it minor and one-dimensional, or has it enough depth to be almost contradictory? do i try too hard to plan life out beforehand, only to be met with chaos? what are my situation rhymes? what are the symbolic repercussions of the situations around me? what are the effects of my friends on my character's life? who are the prince vassilys, anatole kuragins, betsy tverskoys? the pierre bezukhovs, natasha rostovs, and konstantin levins?


taking myself out of my own life like this, separating my experience from my emotions, i feel like i'm watching a play in several acts. watching my character rise and fall, knowing and seeing perfectly clearly the mistakes she is making but understanding their unavoidable necessity in allowing her to arrive, perhaps a bit broken, but always a little wiser, at the next scene.

anna's affair was unavoidable, necessary. her death at the end of the novel feels tragic, but had she not ridden her passion out, made some attempt to feel alive and to experience the intense life force contained inside of her, her ensuing life would have been even more tragic.

"you are not alive until you know that you are living."

so what act am i in? how far into the novel have i come? have i learned enough, have i repented fully, or do i yet have mistakes to suffer through? will my end, like anna's, be unhappy but necessary?

for the moment i am poised as the entranced reader, greedily turning the pages, anticipating and knowing but still anxiously awaiting the final outcome.