While growing up, reading seemed like a chore rather than a hobby. You were forced to read books for school that you may not have had a particular interest in. I really found reading to be a thing of comfort when I got to college. It was around this time that I discovered authors that I was able to connect with and it often felt as though they made their characters to specifically help me through difficult times. Reading became a therapeutic form of entertainment. By therapeutic, I mean clutching the book to my chest and refusing to read the last sentence because it couldn't be over, it just couldn't.
I can't even remember how many times I've finished a book and just stopped and realized that it made me emotionally unstable. I was still living in this world with the characters that I came to know so well. I was feeling the happiness and pain that they felt along the way, and as soon as it ended for them, I wasn't prepared for the story to end for me.
I was experiencing a book hangover. Book hangovers are real and ridiculously fierce.
My fellow book lovers can agree with me when I say that sometimes the difficulty of finishing a book is overwhelming. It's like getting to the last episode in a 10 season series on Netflix and struggling to press play because you know that in 42 minutes, it's over. It's really over.
A book hangover has a cycle, and the cycle begins when you connect emotionally with the characters in the story. You put yourself in between the pages and you are their shadow. You see every move and hear every word, but you're just an observer. You begin to struggle with the fact that you can't actually help them or spend time with them. That's when you know... you're in too deep.
The next phase occurs when your friends and family start noticing that you're talking about the characters as if they are real people in your life. You start to address them by their first names and compare them to other (real) people that you may know. They show their concern, but you assure them that it's only because you're nearing the end and you'll move on quickly. But will you?
Now comes the hard part; finishing the adventure and saying goodbye. You leaf through the pages that you've read and acknowledge how far you've come together. If you're a jumper, you've read the last sentence on the last page. Shame on you. If not, you're attempting, and failing, to prepare yourself for the inevitable.
If you've had a book hangover, you know that it always stems from the book that made you cry real tears and laugh real laughs. It's the book that you may have known was going to break your heart, but you grabbed it off the shelf anyway and here we are.
You force yourself to read the last page and you close your eyes as you shut it because if you didn't see it happen, it didn't really happen.
The next few days are an emotional struggle as you come to terms with the ending of a perfectly committed relationship between book and reader, but fear not! Your roommate just finished a book that you've been dying to read for weeks.
And the cycle continues.
